Power Round

DMM 2022

The theme is Borda Score and Elections. There are a total of 60 points for this round. Throughout
the problem, ties are broken arbitrarily (you cannot break ties to your favor).

1 Borda Score in Single-Winner Elections

The Duke University Math Union (DUMU) is running an election for officers! There are three
voters: Alice, Bob, and Cady, and three candidates: Xavier, Yisa, and Zack. We want to select a
single winner. Each voter ranks the three candidates as follows:

Alice : Xavier > Yisa > Zack,

Bob : Zack > Xavier > Yisa,
Cady : Yisa > Xavier > Zack,

This means, for instance, Alice prefers Xavier the most and Zack the least. In this election, one
might intuitively conclude that Xavier, who has the highest average rank, should win. The DUMU
executive board wants to formalize this intuition, so they decide to select the candidate with the
smallest Borda score.
The definition for Borda score is straightforward: the Borda score of a candidate c for a voter v is
simply the rank of c in v’s ranking, and the Borda score of c is simply her average rank. In this
example, the Borda score of Zack for both Alice and Cady are 3, and 1 for Bob. Hence, the Borda
score of Zack is (1 + 3 + 3)/3 = 73 .
Problem 1: (4 points total)
(a) (2 points) Similarly compute the Borda score for Xavier and Yisa, and explain why Xavier
wins under Borda score.
(b) (2 points) If we add one more voter, is it possible for Yisa to win? Prove your answer.
Going beyond this example, we explore some properties of Borda score.
Problem 2: (6 points total)
(a) (2 points) If a candidate c is ranked first by more than half of the votes in an election, does c
necessarily win under Borda score? Prove your answer.
(b) (2 points) Suppose c wins under Borda score in an election. If we improve the position of c in
some votes and leave everything else the same (i.e. if we exclude c, the rankings remain the same
after the change), does c still win? Prove your answer.

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(c) (2 points) Suppose c wins under Borda score in an election. We then change votes in such a
way that for each vote, if a candidate w was ranked below c originally, w is still ranked below c in
the new vote. Does c still win under the new votes? Prove your answer.

2 Borda Score in Multi-Winner Elections

More generally, let V denote the set of voters and C denote the set of candidates. Suppose there
are n voters and m candidates, i.e. |V| = n and |C| = m. Let rv (c) denote the Borda score of
candidate c for voter v.
In multi-winner elections, we select a set of candidates T , which we call a committee, instead of a
single candidate. The
P Borda score of T for a voter v is rv (T ) = minc∈T rv (c), and the Borda score
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of T is rV (T ) = n v∈V rv (T ). To interpret this score, for each voter, we consider the candidate
with the smallest Borda score; then, we take the sum of these scores, and average it over all voters.
Problem 3: (10 points total)
(a) (2 points) Consider the following election, where we have 5 voters V = {v1 , . . . , v5 } and 5
candidates C = {c1 , . . . , c5 }, where the preferences of the voters for the candidates are
v1 : c1 > c2 > c3 > c4 > c5 ,
v2 : c2 > c1 > c4 > c3 > c5 ,
v3 : c5 > c2 > c1 > c3 > c4 ,
v4 : c3 > c4 > c2 > c5 > c1 ,
v5 : c4 > c1 > c2 > c3 > c5 .

Find the committee of size 2 with the smallest Borda score, and compute its Borda score.
(b) (3 points) Given an election, let Tk∗ denote the committee with the smallest Borda score of size
k. Is it necessarily true that Tk∗ ⊂ Tk+1
∗
? Prove your answer.
(c) (5 points) If we select k candidates uniformly at random from V to form a committee T , what
is E[rV (T )], i.e. the expected value of the Borda score of T ? Express your answer in terms of
n, m, k, and prove your answer.

3 Finding a Good Committee

In practice, we often find a good committee with the following procedure: pick candidates in k
rounds, during which we build sets ∅ = T0 ⊊ T1 ⊊ · · · ⊊ Tk , and declare Tk as the selected
committee. In the j th round, we pick candidate cj ∈ C \ Tj−1 that minimizes rV (Tj−1 ∪ {cj }). In
other words, we greedily pick the candidate that minimizes the Borda score in each round. We
denote this procedure by Greedy.
In this section, we explore some properties of Greedy.
Problem 4: (10 points total)

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(a) (2 points) For k = 3, compute the committee that Greedy produces in the election given in
Problem 3(a).
(b) (3 points) Does Greedy always produce the optimal committee, i.e. the committee with the
smallest Borda score? Prove your answer.
(c) (5 points) Recall that Tj is the committee produced by Greedy after j rounds, rv (Tj ) is the
Borda score of Tj for voter v, and rV (Tj ) is the Borda score of Tj . Prove that
P
rv (Tj )(rv (Tj ) − 1)
rV (Tj ) − rV (Tj+1 ) ≥ v∈V .
2n(m − j)

In the following, we investigate theoretical guarantees on the quality of the committee produced by
Greedy. You can use the conclusion from Problem 4(c) even if you haven’t solved it. Complete
proofs to the Problem 5 can be hard, and partial credits will be offered to useful observations and
reasonable attempts. Write down whatever you think can take you closer to the solution!
Let Rand(k) denote the answer of Problem 3(c), i.e. the expected Borda score of a randomly
selected committee of size k. Recall that Tk is the committee produced by Greedy after k rounds.
Problem 5: (20 points total)
(a) (15 points) Show that, for any election, we have

rV (Tk ) ≤ 2 · Rand(k).

(b) (5 points) Show that there exists an instance such that

rV (Tk ) > Rand(k).

(Hint: You want to show that with appropriate choice of n, m, k, and rankings of voters for
candidates, this inequality is possible.)

4 Generalization: s-Borda Score

One commonly used generalization of Borda Score is s-Borda score. In this section, we use rV (T )
to denote the s-Borda score of T instead of the usual Borda score, which is defined by
!
1X X
rV (T ) = min rv (c) .
n v∈V Q⊆T,|Q|=s
c∈Q

Here, rv (c) still denotes the Borda score of c for v, which is the rank of c in v’s ranking.
Problem 6: (10 points total)
(a) (3 points) Interpret this definition in plain English.

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(b) (2 points) For s = 2, compute the committee of size 3 with the smallest s-Borda score in the
election given in Problem 3(a).
(c) (5 points) If we select k candidates uniformly at random from V to form a committee T , what
is E[rV (T )], i.e. the expected value of the s-Borda score of T ? Prove your answer.