Social choice theory deals with aggregating individual opinions into social choices. Over the past decades a large number of choice methods have been evaluated in terms of various criteria of performance. We focus on methods that can be viewed as distance minimizing ones in the sense that they can be analyzed in terms of a goal state of consensus and the methods themselves can be seen as minimizing the distance of the observed pro. le from that consensus. The methods, thus, provide a way of measuring the degree of disagreement prevailing in the profile.