Approval Ballot Triangles and Strict-Sense Ballots

Abstract

We consider a family of binary triangular arrays, called approval ballot triangles (ABTs), that are in bijection with totally symmetric self-complementary plane partitions (TSSCPPs). These triangles correspond to a ballot process in which voters select their collection of approved candidates rather than voting for a single person. We situate ABTs within the ballot problem literature and then show that a strict-sense ballot can be decomposed into a list of sequentially compatible ABTs.