Mathematical theory of voting and social choice has attracted much attention. In the general setting one can view social choice as a method of aggregating individual, often conflicting preferences and making a choice that is the best compromise. How preferences are expressed and what is the “best compromise” varies and heavily depends on a particular situation. The method we propose in this paper depends on expressing individual preferences of voters and specifying properties of the resulting ra…
Read moreMathematical theory of voting and social choice has attracted much attention. In the general setting one can view social choice as a method of aggregating individual, often conflicting preferences and making a choice that is the best compromise. How preferences are expressed and what is the “best compromise” varies and heavily depends on a particular situation. The method we propose in this paper depends on expressing individual preferences of voters and specifying properties of the resulting ranking by means of first-order formulas. Then, as a technical tool, we use methods of second-order quantifier elimination to analyze and compute results of voting. We show how to specify voting, how to compute resulting rankings and how to verify voting protocols.