Single-Winner Voting with Alliances: Avoiding the Spoiler Effect

We study the setting of single-winner elections with ordinal preferences where candidates might be members of alliances (which may correspond to e.g., political parties, factions, or coalitions). However, we do not assume that candidates from the same alliance are necessarily adjacent in voters’ rankings. In such a case, every classical voting rule is vulnerable to the spoiler effect, i.e., the presence of a candidate may harm his or her alliance. We therefore introduce a new idea of alliance-aware voting rules which extend the classical ones. We show that our approach is superior both to using classical cloneproof voting rules and to running primaries within alliances before the election. We introduce several alliance-aware voting rules and show that they satisfy the most desirable standard properties of their classical counterparts as well as newly introduced axioms for the model with alliances which, e.g., exclude the possibility of the spoiler effect. Our rules have natural definitions and are simple enough to explain to be used in practice.