Related papers: Geometric vulnerability of democratic institutions…
Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…
Every representative democracy must specify a mechanism under which voters choose their representatives. The most common mechanism in the United States -- Winner takes all single-member districts -- both enables substantial partisan…
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…
Liquid democracy is the principle of making collective decisions by letting agents transitively delegate their votes. Despite its significant appeal, it has become apparent that a weakness of liquid democracy is that a small subset of…
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…
While manipulative attacks on elections have been well-studied, only recently has attention turned to attacks that account for geographic information, which are extremely common in the real world. The most well known in the media is…
We propose models for lobbying in a probabilistic environment, in which an actor (called "The Lobby") seeks to influence voters' preferences of voting for or against multiple issues when the voters' preferences are represented in terms 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…
The election control problem through social influence asks to find a set of nodes in a social network of voters to be the starters of a political campaign aiming at supporting a given target candidate. Voters reached by the campaign change…
In distortion-based analysis of social choice rules over metric spaces, one assumes that all voters and candidates are jointly embedded in a common metric space. Voters rank candidates by non-decreasing distance. The mechanism, receiving…
In this study, we propose a generalization of the classic model of liquid democracy that allows fractional delegation of voting weight, while simultaneously allowing for the existence of equilibrium states. Our approach empowers agents to…
We introduce a general framework for exploring the problem of selecting a committee of representatives with the aim of studying a networked voting rule based on a decentralized large-scale platform, which can assure a strong accountability…
We consider a two-round election model involving $m$ voters and $n$ candidates. Each voter is endowed with a strict preference list ranking the candidates. In the first round, the candidates are partitioned into two subsets, $A$ and $B$,…
We prove a quantitative version of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem. We show that a uniformly chosen voter profile for a neutral social choice function f of $q \ge 4$ alternatives and n voters will be manipulable with probability at least…
We consider a distributed voting problem with a set of agents that are partitioned into disjoint groups and a set of obnoxious alternatives. Agents and alternatives are represented by points in a metric space. The goal is to compute the…
The concept and technics of real space renormalization group are applied to study majority rule voting in hierarchical structures. It is found that democratic voting can lead to totalitarianism by keeping in power a small minority.…
Metric distortion in social choice is a framework for evaluating how well voting rules minimize social cost when both voters and candidates exist in a shared metric space, with a voter's cost defined by their distance to a candidate. Voters…
We focus on the potential fragility of democratic elections given modern information-communication technologies (ICT) in the Web 2.0 era. Our work provides an explanation for the cascading attrition of public officials recently in the…
Studying distributed computing through the lens of algebraic topology has been the source of many significant breakthroughs during the last two decades, especially in the design of lower bounds or impossibility results for deterministic…
Election control considers the problem of an adversary who attempts to tamper with a voting process, in order to either ensure that their favored candidate wins (constructive control) or another candidate loses (destructive control). As…