The Absolute Allocation Voting Model

Abstract

Conventional voting rules, being coarse and ordinal in nature, remain fundamentally limited: they rarely generate stable candidate positions that depend on the electorate’s preference intensities, reveal little about the distribution of voter utilities,and remain vulnerable to agenda manipulation. This thesis proposes a solution. Weintroduce Absolute Allocation, a cardinal voting rule in which each voter receivesone divisible unit of influence to distribute positively or negatively across candidates,adapting revealed-preference ideas from microeconomics to electoral choice. Theoretically, we show that Absolute Allocation generates stable candidate positions thatdirectly respond to preference intensity, sharply improves identification of the electorate’s underlying ideal-point distribution, and places hard bounds on manipulationthrough agenda design within a spatial voting framework. Empirically, we apply therule to pre-election survey data to construct counterfactual outcomes in a recent U.S.presidential primary. Together, these results demonstrate that Absolute Allocation offers a more stable, information-rich, and strategically robust foundation for collectivedecision-making than existing voting mechanisms.