Related papers: Quantifying gerrymandering using the vote distribu…
In the United States electoral system, a candidate is elected indirectly by winning a majority of electoral votes cast by individual states, the election usually being decided by the votes cast by a small number of "swing states" where the…
In the classic apportionment problem the goal is to decide how many seats of a parliament should be allocated to each party as a result of an election. The divisor methods provide a way of solving this problem by defining a notion of…
The division of mandates to the European Parliament posed difficulties since the beginning of its operation. Introduction of the degressive proportionality principle to legal acts intensified further discussion on this subject. The…
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in information measures that quantify inaccuracy and uncertainty in systems. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept called the Weighted Fractional Cumulative Residual Inaccuracy…
We present novel methods for predicting the outcome of large elections. Our first algorithm uses a diffusion process to model the time uncertainty inherent in polls taken with substantial calendar time left to the election. Our second model…
Direct democracy is a special case of an ensemble of classifiers, where every person (classifier) votes on every issue. This fails when the average voter competence (classifier accuracy) falls below 50%, which can happen in noisy settings…
Since Downs proposed that the act of voting is irrational in 1957, myriad models have been proposed to explain voting and account for observed turnout patterns. We propose a model in which partisans consider both the instrumental and…
Gerrymandering is a long-standing issue within the U.S. political system, and it has received scrutiny recently by the U.S. Supreme Court. In this note, we prove that deciding whether there exists a fair redistricting among legal maps is…
Data of proportional elections show a striking feature: If the parties are ranked according to the number of their voters, the number of votes grows exponentially with the rank of the party. This so-called Zipf's law has been reported…
Peer reviews, evaluations, and selections are a fundamental aspect of modern science. Funding bodies the world over employ experts to review and select the best proposals from those submitted for funding. The problem of peer selection,…
Strategic manipulation of elections is typically studied in the context of promoting individual candidates. In parliamentary elections, however, the focus shifts: voters may care more about the overall governing coalition than the…
A typical computational geometry problem begins: Consider a set P of n points in R^d. However, many applications today work with input that is not precisely known, for example when the data is sensed and has some known error model. What if…
We study the properties of elections that have a given position matrix (in such elections each candidate is ranked on each position by a number of voters specified in the matrix). We show that counting elections that generate a given…
We design a recursive measure of voting power based on partial as well as full voting efficacy. Classical measures, by contrast, incorporate solely full efficacy. We motivate our design by representing voting games using a division lattice…
The paper develops a general framework for constrained clustering which is based on the close connection of geometric clustering and diagrams. Various new structural and algorithmic results are proved (and known results generalized and…
The Political Districting Problem is mapped to a $q$-state Potts model in which the constraints can be written as interactions between sites or external fields acting on the system. Districting into $q$ voter districts is equivalent to…
Elections for public offices in democratic nations are large-scale examples of collective decision-making. As a complex system with a multitude of interactions among agents, we can anticipate that universal macroscopic patterns could emerge…
We consider the problem of estimating the missing mass, partition function or evidence and its probability distribution in the case that for each sample point in the discrete sample space its (unnormalized) probability mass is revealed.…
Fairness in multiwinner elections is studied in varying contexts. For instance, diversity of candidates and representation of voters are both separately termed as being fair. A common denominator to ensure fairness across all such contexts…
The electoral college of voting system for the US presidential election is analogous to a coarse graining procedure commonly used to study phase transitions in physical systems. In a recent paper, opinion dynamics models manifesting a phase…