Mathematical structure of voting paradoxes

Summary. A theory is developed to explain all positional voting outcomes that can result from a single but arbitrarily chosen profile. This includes all outcomes, paradoxes, and disagreements among positional procedure outcomes as well as all discrepancies in rankings as candidates are dropped or added. The theory explains why each outcome occurs while identifying all illustrating profiles. It is shown how to use this approach to derive properties of methods based on pairwise and positional voting outcomes. Pairwise voting is addressed in the preceding companion paper [15]; the theory for positional methods is developed here.