Structured Voting for Structured Committees

Abstract: There has been much recent work on multiwinner voting systems. However, sometimes a committee is highly structured, and if we want to vote for such a committee, our voting method should be more structured as well. We consider committees consisting of representatives for disjoint parts of a collective; for instance, n departments of an organization might each have m possible representatives to choose from. However, in our model the entire population still gets to vote on the committee, and we need to respect that symmetry, which we do by building on earlier work of Barcelo et al. using representation theory of wreath products. The main thrust of this paper is to advertise and catalog the surprising variety of possible points-based (linear) voting methods in this framework. For instance, if a voter ranks all possible structured committees, it may be reasonable to use weights which depend on the relations between the ranked committees, and not just their order as in 'traditional' voting frameworks!