The likelihood of dubious election outcomes

Summary. A disturbing phenomenon in voting, which causes most of the problems as well as the interest in the field, is that election outcomes (for fixed preferences) can change with the way the ballots are tallied. This causes difficulties because with each possible choice, some set of voters can be dubious about whether it is the “correct” one. But, how likely are these settings allowing multiple election outcomes? By combining properties of the geometry of voting developed by Saari with a analytic-geometric technique created by Schlafli, we determine the likelihood that a three candidate election can cause these potentially dubious outcomes. Received: April 11, 1997; revised version: November 12, 1997