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WiP - Eric Pacuit / Making votes count

Close portrait of a man in glasses, Philosophy professor Eric Pacuit.

WiP - Eric Pacuit / Making votes count

Philosophy Wednesday, April 8, 2026 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm Skinner Building, 1116

Wednesday April 8 at 1:00, our Work-in-Progress series has Eric presenting his new work on voting and fairness, abstracted below.

Procedural fairness is typically understood in terms of equal opportunities to influence decisions. I argue that in voting, this requires equal opportunities to submit decision-relevant input and for identical ballot changes to have equal potential to affect the outcome (the Full Participation Principle). Applied to ranked ballots with a minimal interpretation of the rankings, the principle constrains how voting methods treat pairwise comparisons. Two well-known voting methods violate this constraint. Whether these violations constitute fairness defects depends on how voters understand their rankings.

Add to Calendar 04/08/26 13:00:00 04/08/26 14:00:00 America/New_York WiP - Eric Pacuit / Making votes count

Wednesday April 8 at 1:00, our Work-in-Progress series has Eric presenting his new work on voting and fairness, abstracted below.

Procedural fairness is typically understood in terms of equal opportunities to influence decisions. I argue that in voting, this requires equal opportunities to submit decision-relevant input and for identical ballot changes to have equal potential to affect the outcome (the Full Participation Principle). Applied to ranked ballots with a minimal interpretation of the rankings, the principle constrains how voting methods treat pairwise comparisons. Two well-known voting methods violate this constraint. Whether these violations constitute fairness defects depends on how voters understand their rankings.

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