Evaluation of Borda-Count Aggregation Rules for Participatory Artificial Intelligence Agriculture Model Audits Under Ministry Veto Power: A Governance Manipulability Bound for Smallholder Voice

Participatory audits of artificial intelligence models in agriculture are increasingly proposed as a mechanism for incorporating smallholder voice into governance decisions, yet the aggregation rules that translate individual audit judgments into collective verdicts remain under-theorised when a ministry retains veto power over outcomes. Drawing on social choice theory and the literature on participatory governance in agricultural technology, the paper derives a manipulability bound that characterises the conditions under which strategic misrepresentation by a single auditor or a coalition can alter the Borda winner. The bound is expressed as a function of the number of auditors, the number of alternatives, and the scope of the veto. The Borda rule's manipulability under veto is not monotonic in the size of the auditor pool: expanding participation can increase the vulnerability of the aggregate to strategic behaviour when the veto threshold is low. The contribution is a formal characterisation of the trade-off between smallholder voice and ministerial control in AI agriculture governance, with implications for the design of participatory audit institutions.