Voting procedures are known to be plagued with a variety of difficulties such as strategic voting, or where a voter is rewarded with a better election outcome by not voting, or where a winning candidate can lose by receiving more support. Once we know that these problems can occur, the next...

A theory is developed to explain all positional voting outcomes that can result from a single but arbitrarily chosen profile. This includes all outcomes, paradoxes, and disagreements among positional procedure outcomes as well as all discrepancies in rankings as candidates are dropped or added....