# Voting-Based Cooperation

> Collect votes from multiple agents on candidate options and tally them to produce a collective decision — weighted by role, auditable by design.

- **Category**: Agentic AI
- **Subcategory**: Multi-Agent
- **Canonical URL**: https://designpattern.fyi/patterns/voting_based_cooperation/

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## Description
**Intent**: Finalise a decision across multiple agents by collecting and tallying their votes on candidate options, so the joint output reflects collective rather than single-agent judgment.
**Context**: Several agents — possibly using different models, different prompts, or different perspectives — produce candidate answers or evaluations on the same task. The system needs to return a single decision but the agents don't agree, and the team wants the combined answer to reflect the group, not whoever happened to speak first.
**Solution**: A coordinator agent collects candidate answers (or reflective suggestions) from worker agents, presents them as a ballot to voter agents, and tallies the votes — by majority count, average score, weighted by role, or via a smart-contract mechanism for tamper-evidence. Voting-based cooperation can be combined with role-based or debate-based cooperation as a closing step.



## Use Cases
- Multiple agents have diverse, defensible opinions and a single decision must be returned.
- Audit-grade traceability of how the decision was reached is required.
- Voting weights or eligibility can be defined per role, expertise, or stake.






## Trade-offs


### Advantages

- Fairness — votes can be weighted to reflect role, expertise, or stake in the outcome.

- Accountability — the full voting record is auditable after the fact.

- Collective intelligence — combines multiple agent perspectives and reduces single-agent bias.




### Considerations & Drawbacks

- Centralisation risk — dominant agents can accumulate disproportionate decision rights.

- Overhead — hosting a vote adds communication and coordination cost to every decision.

- Strategic voting — agents may game the procedure if their rewards depend on the outcome.







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**Reference**: [Original Source](https://www.agentpatternscatalog.org/patterns/voting-based-cooperation/)