Perpetual voting addresses fairness in sequential collective decision-making by evaluating representational equity over time. However, existing perpetual voting rules rely on full participation and complete approval information, assumptions that rarely hold in practice, where partial turnout is the norm. In this work, we study the integration of Artificial Delegates, preference-learning agents trained to represent absent voters, into perpetual voting systems. We examine how absenteeism affects fairness and representativeness under various voting methods and evaluate the extent to which Artificial Delegates can compensate for missing participation. Our findings indicate that while absenteeism significantly affects fairness, Artificial Delegates reliably mitigate these effects and enhance robustness across diverse scenarios.
Shah, A, Abels, A, Nowé, A & Lenaerts, T 2025, Artificial Delegates Resolve Fairness Issues in Perpetual Voting with Partial Turnout. in CI '25: Proceedings of the ACM Collective Intelligence Conference. CI '25, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, pp. 71–82. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715928.3737482
Shah, A., Abels, A., Nowé, A., & Lenaerts, T. (2025). Artificial Delegates Resolve Fairness Issues in Perpetual Voting with Partial Turnout. In CI '25: Proceedings of the ACM Collective Intelligence Conference (pp. 71–82). (CI '25). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715928.3737482
@inproceedings{cc8e0e5573d14fd18294b2ac300c43b8,
title = "Artificial Delegates Resolve Fairness Issues in Perpetual Voting with Partial Turnout",
abstract = "Perpetual voting addresses fairness in sequential collective decision-making by evaluating representational equity over time. However, existing perpetual voting rules rely on full participation and complete approval information, assumptions that rarely hold in practice, where partial turnout is the norm. In this work, we study the integration of Artificial Delegates, preference-learning agents trained to represent absent voters, into perpetual voting systems. We examine how absenteeism affects fairness and representativeness under various voting methods and evaluate the extent to which Artificial Delegates can compensate for missing participation. Our findings indicate that while absenteeism significantly affects fairness, Artificial Delegates reliably mitigate these effects and enhance robustness across diverse scenarios.",
keywords = "Perpetual Voting, Computational Social Choice, Preference Elicitation, Fairness, Partial participation, Artificial Delegation",
author = "Apurva Shah and Axel Abels and Ann Now{\'e} and Tom Lenaerts",
year = "2025",
doi = "10.1145/3715928.3737482",
language = "English",
isbn = "9798400714894",
series = "CI '25",
publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery",
pages = "71–82",
booktitle = "CI '25: Proceedings of the ACM Collective Intelligence Conference",
}