A novel approach for discriminating efficient candidates by classifying voters in the preferential voting framework

A key issue in the preferential voting framework is how voters express their preferences on a set of candidates. In the existing voting systems, each voter selects a subset of candidates and ranks them from most to least preferred. The obtained preference score of each candidate is the weighted sum of votes receives in different places. However, most of the existing voting systems assume vote of all voters have equal importance and there is no preference among them. In this paper, a new voting system is introduced to overcome this drawback. In the proposed voting system is assumed that voters are classified into several categories in which the vote of voters in a higher category is more important than the ones in a lower category. Then, an existing ranking method is generalized to rank multiple efficient candidates based on comparing the least preference scores for each efficient candidate with the best and the least preference scores measured in the same range. The proposed method is illustrated with two application examples which prove to be persuasive and acceptable to the election systems.

Data envelopment analysis · Preference score · Ranking · Voting