Proposal : Electing Committees Stephen C

Extensive work has been done to expose and analyze the flaws in common single-candidate election procedures. Arrow’s Theorem states that there exists no perfect voting procedure, so the existing research serves to compare and analyze existing voting systems as well as propose new systems. The problem of electing committees is clearly more complex; less research has been done to investigate the behaviors of voting procedures for committees. One particular complexity is that in a committee election, the voting procedure should respect the voters’ preferences on the committee as a whole as well as on the individual candidates. Thomas Ratliff [1] argues that the optimal voting procedure for electing committees asks voters to produce a full ranking of all possible committees and to score the votes using a Borda count. Unfortunately, the number of possible committees can easily be large enough so that a full ranking is impractical to produce; also, voters often readily identify their top and bottom choices, leaving the middle rankings to nearly arbitrary decision.