Common voting rules as maximum likelihood estimators

Abstract

Voting is a very general method of preference aggregation. A voting rule takes as input every voter’s vote (typically, a ranking of the alternatives), and produces as output either just the winning alternative or a ranking of the alternatives. One potential view of voting is the following. There exists a ‘correct’ outcome (winner/ranking), and each voter’s vote corresponds to a noisy perception of this correct outcome. If we are given the noise model, then for any vector of votes, we can