Related papers: Redistricting: Drawing the Line
We study multiwinner elections with approval-based preferences. An instance of a multiwinner election consists of a set of alternatives, a population of voters---each voter approves a subset of alternatives, and the desired committee size…
The study of complex political phenomena such as parties' polarization calls for mathematical models of political systems. In this paper, we aim at modeling the time evolution of a political system whereby various parties selfishly interact…
We model the societal task of redistricting political districts as a partitioning problem: Given a set of $n$ points in the plane, each belonging to one of two parties, and a parameter $k$, our goal is to compute a partition $\Pi$ of the…
Gerrymandering voting districts is one of the most salient concerns of contemporary American society, and the creation of new voting maps, along with their subsequent legal challenges, speaks for much of our modern political discourse. The…
Respondent driven sampling (RDS) is a method often used to estimate population properties (e.g. sexual risk behavior) in hard-to-reach populations. It combines an effective modified snowball sampling methodology with an estimation procedure…
In parliamentary elections, parties compete for a limited, typically fixed number of seats. Most parliaments are assembled using apportionment methods that distribute the seats based on the parties' vote counts. Common apportionment methods…
The amount of large-scale real data around us increase in size very quickly and so does the necessity to reduce its size by obtaining a representative sample. Such sample allows us to use a great variety of analytical methods, whose direct…
Sampling-based methods such as ReCom are widely used to audit redistricting plans for fairness, with the balanced spanning tree distribution playing a central role since it favors compact, contiguous, and population-balanced districts.…
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…
The budget is the key means for effecting policy in democracies, yet its preparation is typically an excluding, opaque, and arcane process. We aim to rectify this by providing for the democratic creation of complete budgets --- for…
We consider the distributed single-winner metric voting problem on a line, where agents and alternative are represented by points on the line of real numbers, the agents are partitioned into disjoint districts, and the goal is to choose a…
We here study the behavior of political party members aiming at identifying how ideological communities are created and evolve over time in diverse (fragmented and non-fragmented) party systems. Using public voting data of both Brazil and…
Voter suppression and associated racial disparities in access to voting are long-standing civil rights concerns in the United States. Barriers to voting have taken many forms over the decades. A history of violent explicit discouragement…
We investigate efficient ways for the incorporation of liquid democracy into election settings in which voters submit cumulative ballots, i.e., when each voter is assigned a virtual coin that she can then distribute as she wishes among the…
Democracy often fails to meet its ideals, and these failures may be made worse by electoral institutions. Unwanted outcomes include polarized institutions, unresponsive representatives, and the ability of a faction of voters to gain power…
The outcomes of democratic elections rest on individuals' decision-making that is driven by their varying preferences and beliefs. Individuals may prefer consensus to gridlock, or gridlock to consensus, and information may be fractured via…
We study the setting of committee elections, where a group of individuals needs to collectively select a given size subset of available objects. This model is relevant for a number of real-life scenarios including political elections,…
In network science, identifying optimal partitions of a signed network into internally cohesive and mutually divisive clusters based on generalized balance theory is computationally challenging. We reformulate and generalize two binary…
The apportionment problem constitutes a fundamental problem in democratic societies: How to distribute a fixed number of seats among a set of states in proportion to the states' populations? This--seemingly simple--task has led to a rich…
Consider an election where N seats are distributed among parties with proportions p_1,...,p_m of the votes. We study, for the common divisor and quota methods, the asymptotic distribution, and in particular the mean, of the seat excess of a…