Related papers: Physics peeks into the ballot box

Integrity of elections is vital to democratic systems, but it is frequently threatened by malicious actors. The study of algorithmic complexity of the problem of manipulating election outcomes by changing its structural features is known as…

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…

Despite the prevalence of voting systems in the real world there is no consensus among researchers of how people vote strategically, even in simple voting settings. This paper addresses this gap by comparing different approaches that have…

The fundamental equations of various disciplines often seem to share the same basic structure. Natural selection increases information in the same way that Bayesian updating increases information. Thermodynamics and the forms of common…

In an election in which each voter ranks all of the candidates, we consider the head-to-head results between each pair of candidates and form a labeled directed graph, called the margin graph, which contains the margin of victory of each…

The computational study of elections generally assumes that the preferences of the electorate come in as a list of votes. Depending on the context, it may be much more natural to represent the list succinctly, as the distinct votes of the…

The notion that the geometry of our space-time is not only a static background but can be physically dynamic is well established in general relativity. Geometry can be described as shaped by the presence of matter, where such shaping…

This study demonstrates the persistent dominance of identity based voting across democratic systems, using the United States as a primary case and comparative analyses of 19 other democracies as counterfactuals. Drawing solely on election…

The election, a cornerstone of democracy, is one of the best-recognizable symbols of democratic governance. Voters' confidence in elections is essential, and these days, we can watch practically in live broadcast what consequences distrust…

This paper formalizes the lattice structure of the ballot voters cast in a ranked-choice election and the preferences that this structure induces. These preferences are shown to be counter to previous assumptions about the preferences of…

The voter model is a paradigm of ordering dynamics. At each time step, a random node is selected and copies the state of one of its neighbors. Traditionally, this state has been considered as a binary variable. Here, we relax this…

Condorcet's paradox is a fundamental result in social choice theory which states that there exist elections in which, no matter which candidate wins, a majority of voters prefer a different candidate. In fact, even if we can select any $k$…

A boardroom election is an election that takes place in a single room -- the boardroom -- in which all voters can see and hear each other. We present an initial exploration of boardroom elections with ballot privacy and voter verifiability…

Voters from m disjoint constituencies (regions, federal states, etc.) are represented in an assembly which contains one delegate from each constituency and applies a weighted voting rule. All agents are assumed to have single-peaked…

There is still debate on whether voters can detect malicious changes in their printed ballot after making their selections on a Ballot Marking Device (BMD). In this study, we altered votes on a voter's ballot after they had made their…

There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…

We describe nonparametric deconvolution models (NDMs), a family of Bayesian nonparametric models for collections of data in which each observation is the average over the features from heterogeneous particles. For example, these types of…

We give an overview of the diverse electoral systems used in local, national, or super-national elections around the world. We discuss existing methods for selecting single and multiple winners and give real-world examples for some more…

Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…

Numerous models in opinion dynamics focus on the temporal dynamics within a single electoral unit (e.g., country). The empirical observations, on the other hand, are often made across multiple electoral units (e.g., polling stations) at a…