Related papers: Quantifying gerrymandering using the vote distribu…
In this paper we extend the principle of proportional representation to rankings. We consider the setting where alternatives need to be ranked based on approval preferences. In this setting, proportional representation requires that…
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…
Background: We study the statistical properties of fragment coverage in genome sequencing experiments. In an extension of the classic Lander-Waterman model, we consider the effect of the length distribution of fragments. We also introduce…
Ensembles of random legislative districts are a valuable tool for assessing whether a proposed district plan is an outlier or gerrymander. Expert witnesses have presented these in litigation using various methods, and unsurprisingly, they…
Over the last few years, researchers have put significant effort into understanding of the notion of proportional representation in committee election. In particular, recently they have proposed the notion of proportionality degree. We…
Determining the power distribution of the members of a shareholder meeting or a legislative committee is a well-known problem for many applications. In some cases it turns out that power is nearly proportional to relative voting weights,…
We develop a theory of distributive competition under redistricting that explains both electoral outcomes and the equilibrium allocation of policy benefits by endogenizing voter pivotality. In a multi-district model with primaries, general…
Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing biased electoral maps that manipulate the voter population to gain an advantage. The most recent time gerrymandering became an issue was 2019 when the U.S. Federal Supreme Court decided that the…
A recently proposed graph-theoretic metric, the influence gap, has shown to be a reliable predictor of the effect of social influence in two-party elections, albeit only tested on regular and scale-free graphs. Here, we investigate whether…
In political redistricting, the compactness of a district is used as a quantitative proxy for its fairness. Several well-established, yet competing, notions of geographic compactness are commonly used to evaluate the shapes of regions,…
We present an alternative voting system that aims at bridging the gap between proportional representative systems and majoritarian, single winner election systems. The system lets people vote for multiple parties, but then assigns each…
Characterizing precisely the asymptotic generalization error of neural networks using parameters that can be estimated efficiently is a crucial problem in machine learning, which relies heavily on heuristics and practitioners' intuition to…
There has been a recent media blitz on a cohort of mathematicians valiantly working to fix America's democratic system by combatting gerrymandering with geometry. While statistics commonly features in the courtroom (forensics, DNA analysis,…
Finding outlying elements in probability distributions can be a hard problem. Taking a real example from Voting Rights Act enforcement, we consider the problem of maximizing the number of simultaneous majority-minority districts in a…
The ability to measure the satisfaction of (groups of) voters is a crucial prerequisite for formulating proportionality axioms in approval-based participatory budgeting elections. Two common - but very different - ways to measure the…
The use of rapidity gaps is proposed as a measure of the spatial pattern of an event. When the event multiplicity is low, the gaps between neighboring particles carry far more information about an event than multiplicity spikes, which may…
The Constitutionally mandated task of assigning Congressional seats to the various U.S. States proportional to their represented populations ("according to their numbers") has engendered much contention, but rather less consensus. Using the…
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…
The colloquial phrase "partisan bias" encompasses multiple distinct conceptions of bias, including partisan advantage, packing & cracking, and partisan symmetry. All are useful and have their place, and there are several proposed measures…
An alternative voting scheme is proposed to fill the democratic gap between a president elected democratically via universal suffrage (deterministic outcome, the actual majority decides), and a president elected by one person randomly…