Related papers: Electoral Susceptibility
The increasing cost of electoral campaigns raises the need for effective campaign planning and a precise understanding of the return of such investment. Interestingly, despite the strong impact of elections on our daily lives, how this…
Redistricting efforts have gathered contemporary attention in both popular and scholarly debates, particularly in the United States where efforts to redraw congressional districts to favor either of the two major parties in 12 states --…
In modern democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events are the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such large…
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…
Forecasting elections -- a challenging, high-stakes problem -- is the subject of much uncertainty, subjectivity, and media scrutiny. To shed light on this process, we develop a method for forecasting elections from the perspective of…
In the popular debate over the use of ranked-choice voting, it is often claimed that the method of single transferable vote (STV) is immune or mostly immune to the so-called ``spoiler effect,'' where the removal of a losing candidate…
In parliamentary elections, parties compete for a limited, typically fixed number of seats. Most parliaments are assembled using apportionment methods that distribute the seats based on the parties' vote counts. Common apportionment methods…
Shortlisting of candidates--selecting a group of "best" candidates--is a special case of multiwinner elections. We provide the first in-depth study of the computational complexity of strategic voting for shortlisting based on the perhaps…
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…
The strongly polarizing political discourse in the U. S. implies that a small minority of the population, determining the outcome of the presidential elections in a few so called battleground-states, also determines the outcome of the…
In a party-based election system, the voters are grouped into parties and all voters of a party are assumed to vote according to the party preferences over the candidates. Hence, once the party preferences are declared the outcome of the…
Strategic voting, or manipulation, is the process by which a voter misrepresents his preferences in an attempt to elect an outcome that he considers preferable to the outcome under sincere voting. It is generally agreed that manipulation is…
Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. The sources of influence can be generally divided into external, which are independent of social context, or as originating from peers, such as family and friends. An…
We propose a computational framework for modeling opinion dynamics in electoral competitions that combines two realistic features: voter memory and exogenous shocks. The population is represented by a fully-connected network of agents, each…
Research on the causes of political polarization points towards multiple drivers of the problem, from social and psychological to economic and technological. However, political institutions stand out, because -- while capable of…
In this article, we study the effect of vector-valued interventions in votes under a binary voter model, where each voter expresses their vote as a $0-1$ valued random variable to choose between two candidates. We assume that the outcome is…
Constructive election control considers the problem of an adversary who seeks to sway the outcome of an electoral process in order to ensure that their favored candidate wins. We consider the computational problem of constructive election…
A national voting population, when segmented into groups like, for example, different states, can yield a counter-intuitive scenario where the winner may not necessarily get the most number of total votes. A recent example is the 2016…
I derive the probability that a vote cast in an Instant Runoff Voting election will change the election winner. I phrase that probability in terms of the candidates' expected vote totals, and then I estimate its magnitude for different…
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…