Random-Subset Voting

Most of the voting procedures in the literature assume that voters have complete and transitive preferences over the alternatives. A basic premise is that any voter is able to evaluate any pair of alternatives in a set and select his/her preferred one, or indicate indifference between them. Nevertheless, some researchers have highlighted that voters, as humans, have limited capacity to deal with and consequently compare big sets of alternatives. In this paper, we propose the Random-Subset Voting, a voting procedure that through a random approach allows the voters to evaluate less alternatives. Instead of analyzing the entire set of alternatives, each voter will evaluate a random subset of a pre-determined size. We have proposed a theorem indicating that, for large sets of voters, the outcomes of traditional Borda and Random-Subset Borda converge. We have also implemented a web experiment and a Monte Carlo simulation in order to validate the proposed procedure and analyze how it behaves in several scenarios.