SYMMETRIC SCORING RULES AND A NEW CHARACTERIZATION OF THE BORDA COUNT.

Young developed a classic axiomatization of the Borda rule almost 50 years ago. He proved it is the only voting rule satisfying the normative properties of decisiveness, neutrality, reinforcement, faithfulness and cancellation. Often overlooked is that the uniqueness of Borda applies only to variable populations. We present a different set of properties which only Borda satisfies when both the set of voters and the set of alternatives can vary. It is also shown Borda is the only scoring rule which will satisfy all of the new properties when the number of voters stays fixed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]