Fair and Fast Tie-Breaking for Voting

05/30/2022

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by   Lirong Xia, et al.

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We introduce a notion of fairest tie-breaking for voting w.r.t. two widely-accepted fairness criteria: anonymity (all voters being treated equally) and neutrality (all alternatives being treated equally). We proposed a polynomial-time computable fairest tie-breaking mechanism, called most-favorable-permutation (MFP) breaking, for a wide range of decision spaces, including single winners, k-committees, k-lists, and full rankings. We characterize the semi-random fairness of commonly-studied voting rules with MFP breaking, showing that it is significantly better than existing tie-breaking mechanisms, including the commonly-used lexicographic and fixed-agent mechanisms.