Partially verifiable deliberation in voting

This study analyzes a model of collective choice in voting when information is verifiable and pre-voting deliberation is allowed. Each voter has, independently of the others, a positive probability of receiving a private signal about the true state; with complementary probability, the voter is uninformed. Verifiable information means that lying is disallowed during deliberation: informed voters can publicly reveal or hide their signals, while uninformed voters have to disclose their ignorance. We first provide sufficient and necessary conditions under which all voters reveal information fully. Moreover, we derive a counterintuitive result with verifiable information: Voting preceded by deliberation may lead to worse social decisions than a voting process without deliberation.