Compiling the Votes of a Subelectorate

In many practical contexts where a number agents have so as to find a common decision, the votes do not come all together at the same time (for instance, when voting about a date for a meeting, it often happens that one or two participants express their preferences later than others). In such situations, we might want to preprocess the information given by the subelectorate (consisting of those voters who have expressed their votes) so as to “compile” the known votes for the time when the latecomers will have expressed their votes. We study the amount of space necessary to such a compilation, in function of the voting rule used, the number of candidates, the number of voters who have already expressed their votes and the number of remaining voters. We position our results with respect to existing work, especially on vote elicitation and communication complexity.