Related papers: Apportionment methods
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…
An important problem in computational social choice theory is the complexity of undesirable behavior among agents, such as control, manipulation, and bribery in election systems. These kinds of voting strategies are often tempting at the…
The Constitutionally mandated task of assigning Congressional seats to the various U.S. States proportional to their represented populations ("according to their numbers") has engendered much contention, but rather less consensus. Using the…
The Coalitional Manipulation problem has been studied extensively in the literature for many voting rules. However, most studies have focused on the complete information setting, wherein the manipulators know the votes of the…
For more than a century, election officials across the United States have inspected voting machines before elections using a procedure called Logic and Accuracy Testing (LAT). This procedure consists of election officials casting a test…
We analyze Assessment Voting, a new two-round voting procedure that can be applied to binary decisions in democratic societies. In the first round, a randomly-selected number of citizens cast their vote on one of the two alternatives at…
The classical paradox of social choice theory asserts that there is no fair way to deterministically select a winner in an election among more than two candidates; the only definite collective preferences are between individual pairs of…
We consider a social choice setting with agents that are partitioned into disjoint groups, and have metric preferences over a set of alternatives. Our goal is to choose a single alternative aiming to optimize various objectives that are…
By classic results in social choice theory, any reasonable preferential voting method sometimes gives individuals an incentive to report an insincere preference. The extent to which different voting methods are more or less resistant to…
We study higher statistical moments of Distortion for randomized social choice in a metric implicit utilitarian model. The Distortion of a social choice mechanism is the expected approximation factor with respect to the optimal utilitarian…
The simplified hypothesis that an election is polarized as an explanation of recent electoral outcomes worldwide is centered on perceptions of voting patterns rather than ideological data from the electorate. While the literature focuses on…
Parrondo's paradox is about a paradoxical game and gambling where two probabilistic losing games can be combined to form a winning game. While the counter intuitive game is interesting in itself, it can be thought of a discrete version of…
We study a modification of the so-called Parrondo's paradox where a large number of individuals choose the game they want to play by voting. We show that it can be better for the players to vote randomly than to vote according to their own…
Given two sets of data which lead to a similar statistical conclusion, the Simpson Paradox describes the tactic of combining these two sets and achieving the opposite conclusion. Depending upon the given data, this may or may not succeed.…
To aggregate rankings into a social ranking, one can use scoring systems such as Plurality, Veto, and Borda. We distinguish three types of methods: ranking by score, ranking by repeatedly choosing a winner that we delete and rank at the…
We study an ensemble of individuals playing the two games of the so-called Parrondo paradox. In our study, players are allowed to choose the game to be played by the whole ensemble in each turn. The choice cannot conform to the preferences…
We provide elementary proofs of several results concerning the possible outcomes arising from a fixed profile within the class of positional voting systems. Our arguments enable a simple and explicit construction of paradoxical profiles,…
In computational social choice, the distortion of a voting rule quantifies the degree to which the rule overcomes limited preference information to select a socially desirable outcome. This concept has been investigated extensively, but…
We prove that under the Jefferson--D'Hondt method of apportionment, given certain distributional assumptions regarding mean rounding residuals, as well as absence of correlations between party vote shares, district sizes (in votes), and…
Democracies are built upon secure and reliable voting systems. Electronic voting systems seek to replace ballot papers and boxes with computer hardware and software. Proposed electronic election schemes have been subjected to scrutiny, with…