The Impact of Forcing Preference Rankings When Indifference Exists

Abstract

It is definitely possible that situations might exist in which some voters in a three candidate election could be completely indifferent between some of the available candidates. Several complications can then arise during the implementation of many voting rules in the presence of such voter indifference. One possible option that can be used to avoid these types of complications is to require that all voters must arbitrarily break any such indifference ties on candidates, in order to report a complete and transitive preference ranking on the candidates. The current study investigates some possible election outcomes that can result from the use of this forced ranking option, and it is found that there are situations in which this option will have a surprisingly large probability of producing some very negative results in elections.