Selecting Committees

In selecting a committee, voters are often concerned with the over all composition of the committee rather than simply selecting a single individual as their representative. We give two examples of elections at Wheaton College in Massachusetts that illustrate the complexity of preferences that voters may have for the relationships among the individual candidates. These preferences cannot be separated into preferences on the individual candidates and are not detectable from only a voter's top-ranked committee. We outline the questions this raises for the design of committee elections in general and propose directions for future work.