Paradoxical Oddities in Two Multiwinner Elections from Scotland

Abstract

Ranked-choice voting anomalies such as monotonicity paradoxes have been extensively studied through creating hypothetical examples and generating elections under various models of voter behavior. However, very few real-world examples of such voting paradoxes have been found and analyzed. We investigate two single-transferable vote elections from Scotland that demonstrate upward monotonicity, downward monotonicity, no-show, and committee size paradoxes. These paradoxes are rarely observed in real-world elections, and this article is the first case study of such paradoxes in multiwinner elections