Related papers: Electoral Susceptibility
In the process of redistricting, one important metric is the number of competitive districts, that is, districts where both parties have a reasonable chance of winning a majority of votes. Competitive districts are important for achieving…
The problem of how to allocate to states the seats in the US House of Representatives is the most studied instance of what is termed the `apportionment problem'. We propose a new method of apportionment which is stochastic, which meets the…
Like many other voting systems, Majority Judgement suffers from the weaknesses of the underlying mathematical model: Elections as problem of choice or ranking. We show how the model can be enhanced to take into account the complete process…
Influence among individuals is at the core of collective social phenomena such as the dissemination of ideas, beliefs or behaviors, social learning and the diffusion of innovations. Different mechanisms have been proposed to implement…
We present an alternative voting system that aims at bridging the gap between proportional representative systems and majoritarian, single winner election systems. The system lets people vote for multiple parties, but then assigns each…
Political polarization, fueled by public discourse and echo chambers, threatens the foundation of democratic elections. However, traditional one-dimensional opinion models -- assuming ``support for one party equals opposition to another''…
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…
Most work on manipulation assumes that all preferences are known to the manipulators. However, in many settings elections are open and sequential, and manipulators may know the already cast votes but may not know the future votes. We…
Much of the theoretical work on strategic voting makes strong assumptions about what voters know about the voting situation. A strategizing voter is typically assumed to know how other voters will vote and to know the rules of the voting…
We discuss voting scenarios in which the set of voters (agents) and the set of alternatives are the same; that is, voters select a single representative from among themselves. Such a scenario happens, for instance, when a committee selects…
When each voter rates or ranks several candidates for a single office, a strong Condorcet winner (SCW) is one who beats all others in two-way races. Among 21 electoral systems examined, 18 will sometimes make candidate X the winner even if…
In this paper, we consider the voter model with popularity bias. The influence of each node on its neighbors depends on its degree. We find the consensus probabilities and expected consensus times for each of the states. We also find the…
Assuming that partisan fairness and responsiveness are important aspects of redistricting, it is important to measure them. Many measures of partisan bias are satisfactory for states that are balanced with roughly equal proportions of…
We compare the notions "Decisiveness" and "Success" for certain weighted voting systems and various underlying voting measures. In particular, we compute the success rate for the Shapley-Shubik meassure and, more generally, for Common…
Systems of indirect voting based on the principle of qualified majority can be analysed using the methods of game theory. In particular, this applies to the voting system in the Council of the European Union, which was recently a subject of…
Despite many examples to the contrary, most models of elections assume that rules determining the winner will be followed. We present a model where elections are solely a public signal of the incumbent popularity, and citizens can protests…
Independent voters play an increasingly decisive role in contemporary elections, yet their collective behavior remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how a minority of voters with greater flexibility in their political…
An electoral quick count is a statistical procedure whose main objective is to obtain a relatively small but representative sample of all the polling stations in a certain election, and to measure the uncertainty about the final result…
Consider an election where N seats are distributed among parties with proportions p_1,...,p_m of the votes. We study, for the common divisor and quota methods, the asymptotic distribution, and in particular the mean, of the seat excess of a…
Complexity of voting manipulation is a prominent topic in computational social choice. In this work, we consider a two-stage voting manipulation scenario. First, a malicious party (an attacker) attempts to manipulate the election outcome in…