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A national voting population, when segmented into groups like, for example, different states, can yield a counter-intuitive scenario where the winner may not necessarily get the most number of total votes. A recent example is the 2016…
The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…
The median voter theorem has long been the default model of voter behavior and candidate choice. While contemporary work on the distribution of political opinion has emphasized polarization and an increasing gap between the "left" and the…
We provide mechanisms and new metric distortion bounds for line-up elections. In such elections, a set of $n$ voters, $m$ candidates, and $\ell$ positions are all located in a metric space. The goal is to choose a set of candidates and…
This paper proposes an agent-based simulation of a presidential election, inspired by the French 2017 presidential election. The simulation is based on data extracted from polls, media coverage, and Twitter. The main contribution is to…
I derive the probability that a vote cast in an Instant Runoff Voting election will change the election winner. I phrase that probability in terms of the candidates' expected vote totals, and then I estimate its magnitude for different…
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…
Independent voters play an increasingly decisive role in contemporary elections, yet their collective behavior remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how a minority of voters with greater flexibility in their political…
In an election in which each voter ranks all of the candidates, we consider the head-to-head results between each pair of candidates and form a labeled directed graph, called the margin graph, which contains the margin of victory of each…
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…
In the context of voting with ranked ballots, an important class of voting rules is the class of margin-based rules (also called pairwise rules). A voting rule is margin-based if whenever two elections generate the same head-to-head margins…
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…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
The term glass ceiling is applied to the well-established phenomenon in which women and people of color are consistently blocked from reaching the upper-most levels of the corporate hierarchy. Focusing on gender, we present an agent-based…
Post-election audits use the discrepancy between machine counts and a hand tally of votes in a random sample of precincts to infer whether error affected the electoral outcome. The maximum relative overstatement of pairwise margins (MRO)…
We show how to use automated computation of election margins to assess the number of votes that would need to change in order to alter a parliamentary outcome for single-member preferential electorates. In the context of increasing…
To understand and summarize approval preferences and other binary evaluation data, it is useful to order the items on an axis which explains the data. In a political election using approval voting, this could be an ideological left-right…
Examination of precinct level data in US presidential elections reveals a correlation of large precincts and increased fraction of Republican votes. The large precinct bias is analyzed with respect to voter heterogeneity and voter…
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 $B$,…
In Spatial Voting Theory, distortion is a measure of how good the winner is. It is proved that no deterministic voting mechanism can guarantee a distortion better than $3$, even for simple metrics such as a line. In this study, we wish to…