Dodgson's method

Dodgson's Method is a voting mechanism proposed by Charles Dodgson.

In this mechanism, each voter submits an ordered list of all candidates according to their own preference (from best to worst). The winner is defined to be the candidate for whom we need to perform the minimum number of pairwise swaps (added over all candidates) before they become a Condorcet winner. In particular, if there is already a Condorcet winner, they win the election.

In short, we must find the voting profile with minimum Kendall tau distance from the input, such that it has a Condorcet winner; they are declared the victor. Computing the winner is an NP-hard problem^[1].

^ J. Bartholdi III, C. A. Tovey, and M. A. Trick, "Voting schemes for which it can be difficult to tell who won the election", Social Choice and Welfare, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1989), pp. 157–165.

[btt-1] J. Bartholdi III, C. A. Tovey, and M. A. Trick, "Voting schemes for which it can be difficult to tell who won the election", Social Choice and Welfare, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1989), pp. 157–165.

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