Related papers: Exploring Unpopular Presidential Elections
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…
Errors are inevitable in the implementation of any complex process. Here we examine the effect of random errors on Single Transferable Vote (STV) elections, a common approach to deciding multi-seat elections. It is usually expected that…
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…
This paper examines voters' responses to the disclosure of electoral crime information in large democracies. I focus on Brazil, where the electoral court makes candidates' criminal records public before every election. Using a sample of…
There is a tight connection between credit access and voting. We show that uncertainty in access to credit pushes voters toward more conservative candidates in US elections. Using a 1% sample of the US population with valid credit reports,…
We study an outcome of a vote in a population of voters exposed to an externally applied bias in favour of one of two potential candidates. The population consists of ordinary individuals, that are in majority and tend to align their…
Contributing to the toolbox for interpreting election results, we evaluate the robustness of election winners to random noise. We compare the robustness of different voting rules and evaluate the robustness of real-world election winners…
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…
When voter preferences are known in an incomplete (partial) manner, winner determination is commonly treated as the identification of the necessary and possible winners; these are the candidates who win in all completions or at least one…
We consider election scenarios with incomplete information, a situation that arises often in practice. There are several models of incomplete information and accordingly, different notions of outcomes of such elections. In one well-studied…
Analysis of vote distributions using current tools from statistical physics is of increasing interest. While data considered for physics studies are subject to a careful understanding of error sources, such analysis are almost absent in…
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…
For centuries, it has been widely believed that the influence of a small coalition of voters is negligible in a large election. Consequently, there is a large body of literature on characterizing the likelihood for an election to be…
In this paper we propose a novel method to forecast the result of elections using only official results of previous ones. It is based on the voter model with stubborn nodes and uses theoretical results developed in a previous work of ours.…
In the months leading up to political elections in the United States, forecasts are widespread and take on multiple forms, including projections of what party will win the popular vote, state ratings, and predictions of vote margins at the…
Voter fraud in the United States is rare and the vote-counting system is robust against tampering, but there remains widespread distrust in the security of election infrastructure among the public. We consider statistical means of detecting…
We present a contribution to the debate on the predictability of social events using big data analytics. We focus on the elimination of contestants in the American Idol TV shows as an example of a well defined electoral phenomenon that each…
We study the probability that a given candidate is an alpha-winner, i.e. a candidate preferred to each other candidate j by a fraction alpha_j of the voters. This extends the classical notion of Condorcet winner, which corresponds to the…
Social networks are increasingly being used to conduct polls. We introduce a simple model of such social polling. We suppose agents vote sequentially, but the order in which agents choose to vote is not necessarily fixed. We also suppose…
We study the complexity of (approximate) winner determination under the Monroe and Chamberlin--Courant multiwinner voting rules, which determine the set of representatives by optimizing the total (dis)satisfaction of the voters with their…