Related papers: Statistical anomalies in 2011-2012 Russian electio…
US Presidential Election 2012 has been a very tight race between the two key candidates. There were intense battle between the two key candidates. The election reflects the sentiment of the electorate towards the achievements of the…
Political sectarianism is fueled in part by misperceptions of political opponents: People commonly overestimate the support for extreme policies among members of the other party. Research suggests that correcting partisan misperceptions by…
Independent sociological polls are forbidden in Belarus. Online polls performed without sound scientific rigour do not yield representative results. Yet, both inside and outside Belarus it is of great importance to obtain precise estimates…
Several elections run in the last years have been characterized by attempts to manipulate the result of the election through the diffusion of fake or malicious news over social networks. This problem has been recognized as a critical issue…
We study positional voting rules when candidates and voters are embedded in a common metric space, and cardinal preferences are naturally given by distances in the metric space. In a positional voting rule, each candidate receives a score…
The only acceptable form of polling in the multi-billion dollar survey research field utilizes representative samples. We argue that with proper statistical adjustment, non-representative polling can provide accurate predictions, and often…
Russian propaganda outlet RT (formerly, Russia Today) produces content in seven languages. There is ample evidence that RT's communication techniques differ for different language audiences. In this article, we offer the first comprehensive…
In the evolving voter model, when an individual interacts with a neighbor having an opinion different from theirs, they will with probability $1-\alpha$ imitate the neighbor but with probability $ \alpha$ will sever the connection and…
We introduce and study isomorphic distances between ordinal elections (with the same numbers of candidates and voters). The main feature of these distances is that they are invariant to renaming the candidates and voters, and two elections…
We provide mechanisms and new metric distortion bounds for line-up elections. In such elections, a set of $n$ voters, $m$ candidates, and $\ell$ positions are all located in a metric space. The goal is to choose a set of candidates and…
We develop a means to detect ongoing per-country anomalies in the daily usage metrics of the Tor anonymous communication network, and demonstrate the applicability of this technique to identifying likely periods of internet censorship and…
This study explores the relationship between voter trust and their experiences during elections by applying a rule-based data mining technique to the 2022 Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE). Using the Apriori algorithm…
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
Goodness-of-fit tests gauge whether a given set of observations is consistent (up to expected random fluctuations) with arising as independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) draws from a user-specified probability distribution known…
The Bradley effect concerns the discrepancy between opinion polls and actual election outcomes that emerges when candidates do not exhibit ideological, sexual or racial mainstream features. This effect was first observed during the 1982…
We study the utilitarian distortion of social choice mechanisms under the recently proposed learning-augmented framework where some (possibly unreliable) predicted information about the preferences of the agents is given as input. In…
Brexit, a global pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and record inflation - few legislative bodies have faced such a cascade of shocks as the European Parliament did during its 9th term (2019-2024). Using the Bipartite Configuration…
Consider an undirected graph G, representing a social network, where each node is blue or red, corresponding to positive or negative opinion on a topic. In the voter model, in discrete time rounds, each node picks a neighbour uniformly at…
In the US 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama was elected as the 44th president of United States, winning the 53% of popular votes and 68% of electoral votes; in the election of 2000, Al Gore lost the election receiving 49 % of…
We consider two symmetry metrics commonly used to analyze partisan gerrymandering: the Mean-Median Difference (MM) and Partisan Bias (PB). Our main results compare, for combinations of seats and votes achievable in districted elections, the…