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U.S. presidential elections are decided by the Electoral College, established in 1789, and designed to mitigate potential risks arising from the collusion of large groups of citizens. A statewide winner-take-all popular voting system for…
Errors are inevitable in the implementation of any complex process. Here we examine the effect of random errors on Single Transferable Vote (STV) elections, a common approach to deciding multi-seat elections. It is usually expected that…
The paper considers a general model of electoral systems combining district-based elections with a compensatory mechanism in order to create any outcome between strictly majoritarian and purely proportional seat allocation. It contains vote…
A sociophysical model for opinion dynamics is shown to embody a series of recent western hung national votes all set at the unexpected and very improbable edge of a fifty-fifty score. It started with the Bush-Gore 2000 American presidential…
We re-examine the 2012 local government elections in New South Wales, Australia. The count was conducted electronically using a randomised form of the Single Transferable Vote (STV). It was already well known that randomness does make a…
In ranked-choice elections voters cast preference ballots which provide a voter's ranking of the candidates. The method of ranked-choice voting (RCV) chooses a winner by using voter preferences to simulate a series of runoff elections. Some…
Predicting the winner of an election is a favorite problem both for news media pundits and computational social choice theorists. Since it is often infeasible to elicit the preferences of all the voters in a typical prediction scenario, a…
We present a simulation-based study in which the results of two major exit polls conducted during the recall referendum that took place in Venezuela on August 15, 2004, are compared to the official results of the Venezuelan National…
Analysis of vote distributions using current tools from statistical physics is of increasing interest. While data considered for physics studies are subject to a careful understanding of error sources, such analysis are almost absent in…
An important question in elections is the determine whether a candidate can be a winner when some votes are absent. We study this determining winner with the absent votes (WAV) problem when the votes are top-truncated. We show that the WAV…
We study in details the turnout rate statistics for 77 elections in 11 different countries. We show that the empirical results established in a previous paper for French elections appear to hold much more generally. We find in particular…
The existing system for determining election results in Australia is, for the most part, secure, accurate and understandable by the average voter. This thesis explores the design of electronic voting systems designed to achieve these same…
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…
We study positional voting rules when candidates and voters are embedded in a common metric space, and cardinal preferences are naturally given by distances in the metric space. In a positional voting rule, each candidate receives a score…
The Possible Winner problem asks, given an election where the voters' preferences over the candidates are specified only partially, whether a designated candidate can become a winner by suitably extending all the votes. Betzler and Dorn [1]…
There are many sources of error in counting votes: the apparent winner might not be the rightful winner. Hand tallies of the votes in a random sample of precincts can be used to test the hypothesis that a full manual recount would find a…
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 the world's largest-ever deployment of online voting, the iVote Internet voting system was trusted for the return of 280,000 ballots in the 2015 state election in New South Wales, Australia. During the election, we performed an…
Ranked-choice voting anomalies such as monotonicity paradoxes have been extensively studied through creating hypothetical examples and generating elections under various models of voter behavior. However, very few real-world examples of…
The proportional veto principle, which captures the idea that a candidate vetoed by a large group of voters should not be chosen, has been studied for ranked ballots in single-winner voting. We introduce a version of this principle for…