Ties in Multiwinner Approval Voting

L. Janeczko, P. Faliszewski
IJCAI 2023
Abstract
We study the complexity of deciding if there is a tie in a given approval-based multiwinner election, as well as the complexity of counting tied winning committees. We consider a family of Thiele rules, their greedy variants, Phragmen's sequential rule, and Method of Equal Shares. For most cases, our problems are computationally hard, but for sequential rules we find an FPT algorithm for discovering ties (parameterized by the committee size). We also show experimentally that in elections of moderate size ties are quite frequent.

Experiments:

Election type Culture Candidates Voters Instances Parameters
Approval Resampling {30} [20-100] 1000 None
Approval Euclidean 1D {30} [20-100] 1000 k/2 or k approved on average.
Approval PabuLib {30} [20-100] 1000 None