English

Artificial Delegates Resolve Fairness Issues in Perpetual Voting with Partial Turnout

Machine Learning 2025-06-27 v1 Computers and Society

Abstract

Perpetual voting addresses fairness in sequential collective decision-making by evaluating representational equity over time. However, existing perpetual voting rules rely on full participation and complete approval information, assumptions that rarely hold in practice, where partial turnout is the norm. In this work, we study the integration of Artificial Delegates, preference-learning agents trained to represent absent voters, into perpetual voting systems. We examine how absenteeism affects fairness and representativeness under various voting methods and evaluate the extent to which Artificial Delegates can compensate for missing participation. Our findings indicate that while absenteeism significantly affects fairness, Artificial Delegates reliably mitigate these effects and enhance robustness across diverse scenarios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.21186,
  title  = {Artificial Delegates Resolve Fairness Issues in Perpetual Voting with Partial Turnout},
  author = {Apurva Shah and Axel Abels and Ann Nowé and Tom Lenaerts},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.21186},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

The paper has been accepted at the ACM Collective Intelligence Conference (CI 2025), August 4 to 6, 2025, San Diego, CA, USA

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:34:22.329Z