Related papers: Some Statistics concerning the Austrian Presidenti…
Voting methods are instrumental design elements of democracies. Citizens use them to express and aggregate their preferences to reach a collective decision. However, voting outcomes can be as sensitive to voting rules as they are to…
In many real world elections, agents are not required to rank all candidates. We study three of the most common methods used to modify voting rules to deal with such partial votes. These methods modify scoring rules (like the Borda count),…
Electoral fraud often manifests itself as statistical anomalies in election results, yet its extent can rarely be reliably confirmed by other evidence. Here we report the complete results of municipal elections in the town of Vlasikha near…
Statistical comparisons of electoral variables are made between groups of electronic voting machines and voting centers classified by types of transmissions according to the volume of traffic in incoming and outgoing data of machines from…
At least 227~bomb threats against polling places and tabulation centers were received on the day of the 2024 US presidential election. Threats disrupted voting in the swing states of Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania while law enforcement…
Owing to its history and challenging circumstances, social networks community in Ukraine is a very interesting polygon for the study of communications in the constantly changing environment, especially in the political discourse. This…
Elections where electors rank the candidates (or a subset of the candidates) in order of preference allow the collection of more information about the electors' intent. The most widely used election of this type is Instant-Runoff Voting…
We present a novel model for the effect of echo chambers, filter bubbles, and reinforcement on election results. Our model extends the well known voter model with zealots to include reinforcement. We analyze the behaviour of the model,…
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…
One of the most widely known and important applications of probability and statistics is scientific polling to forecast election results. In 1936, Gallup predicted correctly the victory of Roosevelt over Landon in the US presidential…
Election results are determined by numerous social factors that affect the formation of opinion of the voters, including the network of interactions between them and the dynamics of opinion influence. In this work we study the result of…
We study the design of voting rules in the metric distortion framework. It is known that any deterministic rule suffers distortion of at least $3$, and that randomized rules can achieve distortion strictly less than $3$, often at the cost…
I study the co-evolution between public opinion and party policy in situations of crises by investigating a policy U-turn of a major Austrian right-wing party (FPOE) during the Covid-19 pandemic. My analysis suggests the existence of both…
The August 2022 Alaska Special Election for US House contained many interesting features from the perspective of social choice theory. This election used instant runoff voting (often referred to as ranked choice voting) to elect a winner,…
We conjecture that Borda count is the ranked choice voting method that best preserves the outcome of an election with randomly corrupted votes, among all fair voting methods with small influences satisfying the Condorcet Loser Criterion.…
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem states that any constitution which satisfies Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) and Unanimity and is not a Dictator has to be non-transitive. In this paper we study quantitative versions of Arrow…
Leader election between n parties is known to be impossible classically. This work gives a simple algorithm that does it, based on the weak coin flipping protocol with arbitrarily small bias derived by Mochon in 2007, and recently published…
The quantile admission process with veto power is a stochastic processes suggested by Alon, Feldman, Mansour, Oren and Tennenholtz as a model for the evolution of an exclusive social group. The model itself consists of a growing multiset of…
We view voting rules as classifiers that assign a winner (a class) to a profile of voters' preferences (an instance). We propose to apply techniques from formal explainability, most notably abductive and contrastive explanations, to…
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…