Proportionality and Strategyproofness in Multiwinner Elections

TL;DR

This paper investigates the inherent conflict between proportionality and strategyproofness in approval-based multiwinner voting rules, demonstrating through computational methods that no rule can satisfy both properties simultaneously.

Contribution

It establishes an impossibility result showing the fundamental tradeoff between proportionality and strategyproofness in multiwinner elections, using SAT solvers and logical formulations.

Findings

No voting rule can satisfy both weak proportionality and weak strategyproofness.

The proof employs SAT solvers and minimal unsatisfiable sets for validation.

The study discusses related axiomatic questions in committee elections.

Abstract

Multiwinner voting rules can be used to select a fixed-size committee from a larger set of candidates. We consider approval-based committee rules, which allow voters to approve or disapprove candidates. In this setting, several voting rules such as Proportional Approval Voting (PAV) and Phragm\'en's rules have been shown to produce committees that are proportional, in the sense that they proportionally represent voters' preferences; all of these rules are strategically manipulable by voters. On the other hand, a generalisation of Approval Voting gives a non-proportional but strategyproof voting rule. We show that there is a fundamental tradeoff between these two properties: we prove that no multiwinner voting rule can simultaneously satisfy a weak form of proportionality (a weakening of justified representation) and a weak form of strategyproofness. Our impossibility is obtained using a formulation of the problem in propositional logic and applying SAT solvers; a human-readable version of the computer-generated proof is obtained by extracting a minimal unsatisfiable set (MUS). We also discuss several related axiomatic questions in the domain of committee elections.