We wil cover basics of voting theory, starting from an overview of the essential mathematical concepts (transitivity and cardinal vs. ordinal preferences), as well as the notations used to represent individual preferences and their aggregation through voting procedures. Then, we will discuss some desired properties of voting procedures and Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.

The rest of the meeting will focus on concrete examples of voting procedures: majority, plurality (first-past-the-post), the Borda Count, and the sequential pairwise comparisons. In light of these, we will illustrate some of the key problems with familiar mechanisms for social preference aggregation, insisting on the Borda Count's violation of the Independence from Irrelevant Alternatives, the Borda Count's failure to select the Condorcet Winner, and the paradoxes associated with the single elimination tournament (the Dominated Winner Paradox and the Voter's Paradox/voting cycles).