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A number of models and techniques has been proposed for predicting the outcomes of presidential elections. Some of them use information on the socio-economical status of a country, others focus on candidates' popularity measures in news…
In elections, the vote shares or turnout rates show a strong spatial correlation. The logarithmic decay with distance suggests that a 2D noisy diffusive equation describes the system. Based on the study of U.S. presidential elections data,…
Inconsistent political statements represent a form of misinformation. They erode public trust and pose challenges to accountability, when left unnoticed. Detecting inconsistencies automatically could support journalists in asking…
We present a method and software for ballot-polling risk-limiting audits (RLAs) based on Bernoulli sampling: ballots are included in the sample with probability $p$, independently. Bernoulli sampling has several advantages: (1) it does not…
Many democratic political parties hold primary elections, which nicely reflects their democratic nature and promote, among other things, the democratic value of inclusiveness. However, the methods currently used for holding such primary…
In research and policy-making guidelines, the single-bidder rate is a commonly used proxy of corruption in public procurement used but ipso facto this is not evidence of a corrupt auction, but an uncompetitive auction. And while an…
In this paper, a new modification of ranked set sampling (RSS) is suggested, namely; unified ranked set sampling (URSS) for estimating the population mean and variance. The performance of the empirical mean and variance estimators based on…
We have searched for anomalous events using 2,520 hours of archival observations from Murriyang, CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope. These observations were originally undertaken to search for pulsars. We used a machine-learning algorithm based…
A core tension in the study of plurality elections is the clash between the classic Hotelling-Downs model, which predicts that two office-seeking candidates should position themselves at the median voter's policy, and the empirical…
Understanding the personality of Russians who support the war in Ukraine is one of the key steps to understanding how this war became possible. However, during the war, traditional sociological methods are not always applicable. Social…
Search engines (SEs) and large language models (LLMs) are central to political information access, yet their algorithmic decisions and potential underlying biases remain underexplored. We developed a standardized, privacy-preserving,…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. By being flexible about the location or width of the center, this measure enables the researcher to analyze polarization…
On 24 February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, starting one of the largest military conflicts in Europe in recent years. In this paper we present preliminary findings about the impact of the conflict on the Internet performance in Ukraine and…
Social media sites are becoming a key factor in politics. These platforms are easy to manipulate for the purpose of distorting information space to confuse and distract voters. Past works to identify disruptive patterns are mostly focused…
In 2016, a network of social media accounts animated by Russian operatives attempted to divert political discourse within the American public around the presidential elections. This was a coordinated effort, part of a Russian-led complex…
In this paper, we are interested in understanding the interrelationships between mainstream and social media in forming public opinion during mass crises, specifically in regards to how events are framed in the mainstream news and on social…
Much research in electoral control -- one of the most studied form of electoral attacks, in which an entity running an election alters the structure of that election to yield a preferred outcome -- has focused on giving decision complexity…
Predicting the winner of an election is a favorite problem both for news media pundits and computational social choice theorists. Since it is often infeasible to elicit the preferences of all the voters in a typical prediction scenario, a…
Electoral forecasting is an ongoing scientific challenge with high social impact, as current data-driven methods try to efficiently combine statistics with economic indices and machine learning. However, recent studies in network science…
While manipulative attacks on elections have been well-studied, only recently has attention turned to attacks that account for geographic information, which are extremely common in the real world. The most well known in the media is…