Related papers: Physics peeks into the ballot box
We examine kinetic symmetry breaking phenomena in an evolutionary political game in which voters, inhabiting a multidimensional ideological space, cast ballots via selection mechanisms subject to the competing forces of conformity and…
An assembly of $n$ voters needs to decide on $t$ independent binary issues. Each voter has opinions about the issues, given by a $t$-bit vector. Anscombe's paradox shows that a policy following the majority opinion in each issue may not…
Consider an election between two candidates in which the voters' choices are random and independent and the probability of a voter choosing the first candidate is $p>1/2$. Condorcet's Jury Theorem which he derived from the weak law of large…
The availability of electoral data in electronic format allowed to physicist and mathematicians their own analysis. Beyond theoretical models for electoral processes, new regularities had been found in the data analysis of many countries…
We consider spatial voting where candidates are located in the Euclidean $d$-dimensional space, and each voter ranks candidates based on their distance from the voter's ideal point. We explore the case where information about the location…
Statistical physics cannot explain why a thermodynamic arrow of time exists, unless one postulates very special and unnatural initial conditions. Yet, we argue that statistical physics can explain why the thermodynamic arrow of time is…
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,…
The nature of the future is completely different from the nature of the past. When quantum effects are significant, the future shows all the signs of quantum weirdness, including duality, uncertainty, and entanglement. With the passage of…
The Possible Winner problem asks, given an election where the voters' preferences over the candidates are specified only partially, whether a designated candidate can become a winner by suitably extending all the votes. Betzler and Dorn [1]…
Many democratic countries use district-based elections where there is a "seat" for each district in the governing body. In each district, the party whose candidate gets the maximum number of votes wins the corresponding seat. The result of…
We hypothesize that if election results are manipulated or forged, then, due to the well-known human attraction to round numbers, the frequency of reported round percentages can be increased. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed raw data…
Election poll reporting often focuses on mean values and only subordinately discusses the underlying uncertainty. Subsequent interpretations are too often phrased as certain. Moreover, media coverage rarely adequately takes into account the…
In district-based elections, electors cast votes in their respective districts. In each district, the party with maximum votes wins the corresponding seat in the governing body. The election result is based on the number of seats won by…
In this work we scrutinize the deterministic nature of globally hyperbolic space-times from the point of view of an observer. We show that a space-time point $q \in M$ that lies to the future of an observer at $p \in M$, receives signals…
Moir\'e patterns are omnipresent. They are important for any overlapping periodic phenomenon, from vibrational and electromagnetic, to condensed matter. Here we show, both theoretically and via experimental simulations by ultracold atoms,…
We investigate the recurrence properties of the time series of quantum mechanical expectation values, in terms of two representative models for a single-mode radiation field interacting with a nonlinear medium. From recurrence-time…
The Born rule may be stated mathematically as the rule that probabilities in quantum theory are expectation values of a complete orthogonal set of projection operators. This rule works for single laboratory settings in which the observer…
We explore the relation between two natural symmetry properties of voting rules. The first is transitive-symmetry -- the property of invariance to a transitive permutation group -- while the second is the "unbiased" property of every voter…
We study the observable long-term behavior of typical continuous dynamical systems on the interval $[0,1]$. For a residual subset of $C([0,1])$, the Milnor, statistical, and physical (in the sense of Ilyashenko) attractors coincide and are…
Scoring protocols are a broad class of voting systems. Each is defined by a vector $(\alpha_1,\alpha_2,...,\alpha_m)$, $\alpha_1 \geq \alpha_2 \geq >... \geq \alpha_m$, of integers such that each voter contributes $\alpha_1$ points to…