Christine Lindop

Voting is the process of choosing officials or policies by casting a ballot, a document used by people to formally express their preferences. Republics and representative democracies are governments where the population chooses representatives by voting.
The procedure for identifying the winners based on votes varies depending on both the country and the political office. Political scientists call these procedures electoral systems, while mathematicians and economists call them social choice rules. The study of these rules and what makes them good or bad is the subject of a branch of welfare economics known as social choice theory.