Kemeny-Young method

The Kemeny–Young method is an electoral system that uses preferential ballots and pairwise comparison counts to identify the most popular choices in an election. It is a Condorcet method because if there is a Condorcet winner, it will always be ranked as the most popular choice.

This method assigns a score for each possible sequence, where each sequence considers which choice might be most popular, which choice might be second-most popular, which choice might be third-most popular, and so on down to which choice might be least-popular. The sequence that has the highest score is the winning sequence, and the first choice in the winning sequence is the most popular choice. (As explained below, ties can occur at any ranking level.)

The Kemeny–Young method is also known as the Kemeny rule, VoteFair popularity ranking, the maximum likelihood method, and the median relation.

The Kemeny–Young method uses preferential ballots on which voters rank choices according to their order of preference. A voter is allowed to rank more than one choice at the same preference level. Unranked choices are usually interpreted as least-preferred.

Another way to view the ordering is that it is the one which minimizes the sum of the Kendall tau distances (bubble sort distance) to the voters' lists.

Kemeny–Young calculations are usually done in two steps. The first step is to create a matrix or table that counts pairwise voter preferences. The second step is to test all possible rankings, calculate a score for each such ranking, and compare the scores. Each ranking score equals the sum of the pairwise counts that apply to that ranking.

The ranking that has the largest score is identified as the overall ranking. (If more than one ranking has the same largest score, all these possible rankings are tied, and typically the overall ranking involves one or more ties.)

In order to demonstrate how an individual preference order is converted into a tally table, it is worth considering the following example. Suppose that a single voter has a choice among four candidates (i.e. Elliot, Meredith, Roland, and Selden) and has the following preference order:

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