Differentially Private Condorcet Voting

Abstract

Designing private voting rules is an important and pressing problem for trustworthy democracy. In this paper, under the framework of differential privacy, we propose a novel famliy of randomized voting rules based on the well-known Condorcet method, and focus on three classes of voting rules in this family: Laplacian Condorcet method (CMLAP), exponential Condorcet method (CMEXP), and randomized response Condorcet method (CMRR), where λ represents the level of noise. We prove that all of our rules satisfy absolute monotonicity, lexi-participation, probabilistic Pareto efficiency, approximate probabilistic Condorcet criterion, and approximate SD-strategyproofness. In addition, CMRR satisfies (non-approximate) probabilistic Condorcet criterion, while CMLAP and CMEXP satisfy strong lexi-participation. Finally, we regard differential privacy as a voting axiom, and discuss its relations to other axioms.