Consensus Seeking: How Juror Exclusion Shapes Strategic Incentives in the Borda Count

We examine incentives and strategic behavior in a voting game using a new modification of the Borda count in which the score of the juror with the largest deviation from the mean score vector is excluded. We show that introducing juror exclusion has a strong effect on incentives. In particular, it motivates jurors to align with the mean. When jurors' preferences are closely aligned - that is, when the subjective component of the evaluation is small relative to the objective one - excluding the outlier's score is likely to reduce manipulation. However, when jurors' preferences differ significantly, the method may actually increase misreporting compared to the standard Borda count without juror exclusion.