Fast Schulze Voting Using Quickselect
Abstract
The Schulze voting method aggregates voter preference data using maxmin-weight graph paths, achieving the Condorcet property that a candidate who would win every head-to-head contest will also win the overall election. Once the voter preferences among $m$ candidates have been arranged into an $m\times m$ matrix of pairwise election outcomes, a previous algorithm of Sornat, Vassilevska Williams and Xu (EC '21) determines the Schulze winner in randomized expected time $O(m^2\log^4 m)$. We improve this to randomized expected time $O(m^2\log m)$ using a modified version of quickselect.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications
- Volume
- 30
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 237–252
- Publication date
- 24 June 2026
- Language
- EN