Related papers: Apportionment methods
We present a new model that describes the process of electing a group of representatives (e.g., a parliament) for a group of voters. In this model, called the voting committee model, the elected group of representatives runs a number of…
The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…
Elections and opinion polls often have many candidates, with the aim to either rank the candidates or identify a small set of winners according to voters' preferences. In practice, voters do not provide a full ranking; instead, each voter…
A key promise of democratic voting is that, by accounting for all constituents' preferences, it produces decisions that benefit the constituency overall. It is alarming, then, that all deterministic voting rules have unbounded distortion:…
The standard voting methods in the United States, plurality and ranked choice (or instant runoff) voting, are susceptible to significant voting failures. These flaws include Condorcet and majority failures as well as monotonicity and…
Election systems based on scores generally determine the winner by computing the score of each candidate and the winner is the candidate with the best score. It would be natural to expect that computing the winner of an election is at least…
An election is a process through which citizens in liberal democracies select their governing bodies, usually through voting. For elections to be truly honest, people must be able to vote freely without being subject to coercion; that is…
Social choice theory offers a wealth of approaches for selecting a candidate on behalf of voters based on their reported preference rankings over options. When voters have underlying utilities for these options, however, using preference…
Participatory budgeting is one of the exciting developments in deliberative grassroots democracy. We concentrate on approval elections and propose proportional representation axioms in participatory budgeting, by generalizing relevant…
Representative democracy in the United States relies on election systems that transmit votes into representatives in three key bodies: the two chambers of the federal legislature (House of Representatives and Senate) and the Electoral…
This article aims to present a unified framework for grading-based voting processes. The idea is to represent the grades of each voter on d candidates as a point in R^d and to define the winner of the vote using the deepest point of the…
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…
This paper considers elections in which voters choose one candidate each, independently according to known probability distributions. A candidate receiving a strict majority (absolute or relative, depending on the version) wins. After the…
The paper considers the problem of finding the number of dominant voters in two-level voting procedures. At the first stage, voting is conducted among local groups of voters, and at the second stage, the results are aggregated to form a…
As the world's democratic institutions are challenged by dissatisfied citizens, political scientists and also computer scientists have proposed and analyzed various (innovative) methods to select representative bodies, a crucial task in…
To understand and summarize approval preferences and other binary evaluation data, it is useful to order the items on an axis which explains the data. In a political election using approval voting, this could be an ideological left-right…
Parrondo's paradox arises in sequences of games in which a winning expectation may be obtained by playing the games in a random order, even though each game in the sequence may be lost when played individually. We present a suitable version…
One way of evaluating social choice (voting) rules is through a utilitarian distortion framework. In this model, we assume that agents submit full rankings over the alternatives, and these rankings are generated from underlying, but…
To many statisticians and citizens, the outcome of the most recent U.S. presidential election represents a failure of data-driven methods on the grandest scale. This impression has led to much debate and discussion about how the election…
Proponents of participatory democracy praise Liquid Democracy: decisions are taken by referendum, but voters delegate their votes freely. When better informed voters are present, delegation can increase the probability of a correct…