Related papers: Statistical detection of systematic election irreg…
Foreign power interference in domestic elections is an existential threat to societies. Manifested through myriad methods from war to words, such interference is a timely example of strategic interaction between economic and political…
In a country with many elections, it may prove economically expedient to hold multiple elections simultaneously on a common polling date. We show that in a polarized society, in which each voter has a preferred party, an increase in the…
The AI ethics of statistical fairness is an error, the approach should be abandoned, and the accumulated academic work deleted. The argument proceeds by identifying four recurring mistakes within statistical fairness. One conflates fairness…
The Skating System, which originated from the scrutineering system in dance sport tournaments, can be formulated as a voting system: We introduce and formalize the Skating System Single (SkS, for short), a new voting system embedded into…
As granular data about elections and voters become available, redistricting simulation methods are playing an increasingly important role when legislatures adopt redistricting plans and courts determine their legality. These simulation…
Social media platforms allow users to create polls to gather public opinion on diverse topics. However, we know little about what such polls are used for and how reliable they are, especially in significant contexts like elections. Focusing…
Spatial distribution of the human population is distinctly heterogeneous, e.g. showing significant difference in the population density between urban and rural areas. In the historical perspective, i.e. on the timescale of centuries, the…
One of the hallmarks of a free and fair society is the ability to conduct a peaceful and seamless transfer of power from one leader to another. Democratically, this is measured in a citizen population's trust in the electoral system of…
Electronic voting systems have significant advantages in comparison with physical voting systems. One of the main challenges in e-voting systems is to secure the voting process: namely, to certify that the computed results are consistent…
We analyze Assessment Voting, a new two-round voting procedure that can be applied to binary decisions in democratic societies. In the first round, a randomly-selected number of citizens cast their vote on one of the two alternatives at…
We analyze how numerical experiments regarding elections were conducted within the computational social choice literature (focusing on papers published in the IJCAI, AAAI, and AAMAS conferences). We analyze the sizes of the studied…
Information in the time distribution of points in a state space reconstructed from observed data yields a test for ``nonstationarity''. Framed in terms of a statistical hypothesis test, this numerical algorithm can discern whether some…
{\em Distortion} is a well-established notion for quantifying the loss of social welfare that may occur in voting. As voting rules take as input only ordinal information, they are essentially forced to neglect the exact values the agents…
This paper considers elections in which voters choose one candidate each, independently according to known probability distributions. A candidate receiving a strict majority (absolute or relative, depending on the version) wins. After the…
We consider the problem of predicting winners in elections, for the case where we are given complete knowledge about all possible candidates, all possible voters (together with their preferences), but where it is uncertain either which…
We consider a model where a subset of candidates must be selected based on voter preferences, subject to general constraints that specify which subsets are feasible. This model generalizes committee elections with diversity constraints,…
Counting votes is complex and error-prone. Several statistical methods have been developed to assess election accuracy by manually inspecting randomly selected physical ballots. Two 'principled' methods are risk-limiting audits (RLAs) and…
We analyse the structure and behaviour of a specific voting network using a dynamic structure-based methodology which draws on Q-Analysis and social network theory. Our empirical focus is on the Eurovision Song Contest over a period of 20…
We present three voting protocols with unconditional privacy and correctness, without assuming any bound on the number of corrupt participants. All protocols have polynomial complexity and require private channels and a simultaneous…
Citizens' assemblies are a form of democratic innovation in which a randomly selected panel of constituents deliberates on questions of public interest. We study a novel goal for the selection of panel members: maximizing the entropy of the…