Some Notes on Voting Schemes and the Will of the Majority*

This paper is a study in the theory of committees and elections. By a committee we will mean any group of people who arrive at a decision by means of voting. By a voting scheme I we will mean any method by which individual voting decisions are aggregated into committee decisions. Given various voting schemes we shall examine three techniques by which members may seek to manipulate committee decisions to their advantage: a) additions or deletions to the alternatives to be considered b) deliberate distortions of one's own voting preferences c) manipulation of the order in .which alternatives are voted upon, and shall prove some theorems about rational voting behavior when preferences are unidimensionally scalable.