  Committee decisions are complicated by a deadline, e.g., the next start of a
budget, or the beginning of a semester. In committee hiring decisions, it may
be that if no candidate is supported by a strong majority, the default is to
hire no one - an option that may cost dearly. As a result, committee members
might prefer to agree on a reasonable, if not necessarily the best, candidate,
to avoid unfilled positions. In this paper, we propose a model for the above
scenario - Consensus Under a Deadline (CUD)- based on a time-bounded iterative
voting process. We provide convergence guarantees and an analysis of the
quality of the final decision. An extensive experimental study demonstrates
more subtle features of CUDs, e.g., the difference between two simple types of
committee member behavior, lazy vs.~proactive voters. Finally, a user study
examines the differences between the behavior of rational voting bots and real
voters, concluding that it may often be best to have bots play on the voters'
behalf.
