Non-anonymous ballot aggregation: an axiomatic generalization of Approval Voting.

We study axiomatically situations in which the society agrees to treat voters with different characteristics distinctly. In this setting, we propose a set of six intuitive axioms and show that they jointly characterize a new class of voting procedures, called Personalized Approval Voting. According to this family, each voter has a strictly positive and finite weight (the weight is necessarily the same for all voters with the same characteristics) and the alternative with the highest number of weighted votes is elected. Hence, the implemented voting procedure reduces to Approval Voting in case all voters are identical or the procedure assigns the same weight to all types.