Department of Mathematics, Statistics
and Computer Science
Wim Ruitenburg's Fall 2009 MATH 1300-101
Book, chapter 1 on voting
This book chapter more or less considers three aspects of the voting process.
- Each voter has an ordered list of candidates, which is transitive and
invariant under eliminations (pages 4 and 5).
- Several procedures are given to determine the winner of the vote, like
plurality (page 6), Borda count (page 10), plurality with elimination (page
12), and more.
- Several fairness conditions are suggested, which one may wish to hold
for the determination of the winner regardless of the vote distribution, like
the majority criterion (page 6), the Condorcet criterion (page 8), the
monotonicity criterion (page 16), and the independence of irrelevant
alternatives criterion (page 19).
A main point is that none of the procedures to select a winner, satisfies all
fairness criteria at once.
Last updated: September 2009
Comments & suggestions:
wimr@mscs.mu.edu