Related papers: Statistical anomalies in 2011-2012 Russian electio…

To many statisticians and citizens, the outcome of the most recent U.S. presidential election represents a failure of data-driven methods on the grandest scale. This impression has led to much debate and discussion about how the election…

Election data represent a precious source of information to study human behavior at a large scale. In proportional elections with open lists, the number of votes received by a candidate, rescaled by the average performance of all…

The Washigton Post had published allegations, that results of Russian elections "violate Gauss's groundbreaking work on statistics." I show that these allegations lack scientific basis.

Elections, the cornerstone of democratic societies, are usually regarded as unpredictable due to the complex interactions that shape them at different levels. In this work, we show that voter turnouts contain crucial information that can be…

One of the key aspects of the United States democracy is free and fair elections that allow for a peaceful transfer of power from one President to the next. The 2016 US presidential election stands out due to suspected foreign influence…

A distinction in reasons and motives for choosing a particular political leader establishes the key difference between older and young democracy. The former is based on electoral history, while the latter is based on feelings and personal…

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…

The previous twelve turnout rates of French national elections by municipality show regularities. These regularities do not depend on the national turnout level, nor on the nature of the election. Based on past statistical regularities we…

"Kompromat" (the Russian word for "compromising material") has been efficiently used to harass Russian political and business elites since the days of the USSR. Online crowdsourcing projects such as "RuCompromat" made it possible to catalog…

Donald Trump was lagging behind in nearly all opinion polls leading up to the 2016 US presidential election, but he surprisingly won the election. This raises the following important questions: 1) why most opinion polls were not accurate in…

This paper examines the dynamic relationship between electoral polls and indicators of economic and financial uncertainty during the last two U.S. presidential elections (2020 and 2024). Using daily polling data on Donald Trump and measures…

Electoral systems are subject of study for physicist and mathematicians in last years given place to a new area: sociophysics. Based on previous works of the author on the Mexican electoral processes in the new millennium, he found three…

This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…

Polls posted on social media have emerged in recent years as an important tool for estimating public opinion, e.g., to gauge public support for business decisions and political candidates in national elections. Here, we examine nearly two…

We survey the design of elections that are resilient to attempted interference by third parties. For example, suppose votes have been cast in an election between two candidates, and then each vote is randomly changed with a small…

Efforts by foreign actors to influence public opinion have gained considerable attention because of their potential to impact democratic elections. Thus, the ability to identify and counter sources of disinformation is increasingly becoming…

We explain the anomaly of election results between large cities and rural areas in terms of urban scaling in the 1948-2016 US elections and in the 2016 EU referendum of the UK. The scaling curves are all universal and depend on a single…

While the polls have been the most trusted source for election predictions for decades, in the recent presidential election they were called inaccurate and biased. How inaccurate were the polls in this election and can social media beat the…

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…

Coordinated information operations remain a persistent challenge on social media, despite platform efforts to curb them. While previous research has primarily focused on identifying these operations within individual platforms, this study…