Related papers: Some Statistics concerning the Austrian Presidenti…
In 2016, a Wisconsin court struck down the state assembly map due to unconstitutional gerrymandering. If this ruling is upheld by the Supreme Court's pending 2018 decision, it will be the fist successful political gerrymandering case in the…
Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…
The metric distortion framework posits that n voters and m candidates are jointly embedded in a metric space such that voters rank candidates that are closer to them higher. A voting rule's purpose is to pick a candidate with minimum total…
The Brexit referendum took place in the UK in June, 2016. The unweighted percentage of leavers over the whole population was 51.9%. In this paper, first, we demonstrate that a 52%-48% split represents only a difference that is not…
We propose a new protocol for quantum anonymous voting having serious advantages over the existing protocols: it protects both the voters from a curious tallyman and all the participants from a dishonest voter in unconditional way. The…
This paper explains the main principles and some of the technical details for auditing the scanning and digitisation of the Australian Senate ballot papers. We give a short summary of the motivation for auditing paper ballots, explain the…
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…
We present a protocol that allows voters to phone in their votes. Our protocol makes it expensive for a candidate and a voter to cooperate to prove to the candidate who the voter voted for. When the electoral pool is large enough, the cost…
Instant runoff voting (IRV) has recently gained popularity as an alternative to plurality voting for political elections, with advocates claiming a range of advantages, including that it produces more moderate winners than plurality and…
Since the 1970s there has been a large number of countries that combine formal democratic institutions with authoritarian practices. Although in such countries the ruling elites may receive considerable voter support they often employ…
Instant runoff voting (IRV) is an increasingly-popular alternative to traditional plurality voting in which voters submit rankings over the candidates rather than single votes. In practice, elections using IRV often restrict the ballot…
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…
This paper presents DiffSum, a simple post-election risk-limiting ballot-polling audit for two-candidate plurality elections. DiffSum sequentially draws ballots (without replacement) until the numbers $a$, $b$, of votes for candidates $A$,…
Motivated by the difficulty of specifying complete ordinal preferences over a large set of $m$ candidates, we study voting rules that are computable by querying voters about $t < m$ candidates. Generalizing prior works that focused on…
Single Transferable Vote (STV) is used to elect candidates to the 76 seat Australian Senate across six states and two territories. These eight STV contests are counted using a combination of ballot scanners, manual data entry and tabulation…
In this paper, we provide theoretical and empirical estimates for the likelihood of a negative participation paradox under instant runoff voting in three-candidate elections. We determine the probability of the paradox and related…
Several election districts in the US have recently moved to ranked-choice voting (RCV) to decide the results of local elections. RCV allows voters to rank their choices, and the results are computed in rounds, eliminating one candidate at a…
We explain the anomaly of election results between large cities and rural areas in terms of urban scaling in the 1948-2016 US elections and in the 2016 EU referendum of the UK. The scaling curves are all universal and depend on a single…
We consider elections where both voters and candidates can be associated with points in a metric space and voters prefer candidates that are closer to those that are farther away. It is often assumed that the optimal candidate is the one…
Independent sociological polls are forbidden in Belarus. Online polls performed without sound scientific rigour do not yield representative results. Yet, both inside and outside Belarus it is of great importance to obtain precise estimates…