Related papers: Evaluating Partisan Gerrymandering in Wisconsin

We consider a setting with agents that have preferences over alternatives and are partitioned into disjoint districts. The goal is to choose one alternative as the winner using a mechanism which first decides a representative alternative…

There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…

Approximating complex probability distributions, such as Bayesian posterior distributions, is of central interest in many applications. We study the expressivity of geometric Gaussian approximations. These consist of approximations by…

We study a model of a population making a binary decision based on information spreading within the population, which is fully connected or covering a square grid. We assume that a fraction of the population wants to make the choice of the…

With the increasing frequency of major natural disasters, understanding their political consequences is of paramount importance for democratic accountability. The existing literature is deeply divided, with some studies finding that voters…

We explain the anomaly of election results between large cities and rural areas in terms of urban scaling in the 1948-2016 US elections and in the 2016 EU referendum of the UK. The scaling curves are all universal and depend on a single…

In recent decades, state legislatures have often drawn U.S. Congressional voting districts that look---to the human eye---to be rather twisted. In this paper, we propose a method to measure how much districts "meander" via a computation of…

The vast majority of US public school districts use school attendance boundaries to determine which student addresses are assigned to which schools. Existing work shows how redrawing boundaries can be a powerful policy lever for increasing…

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…

Humans are capable of adjusting to changing environments flexibly and quickly. Empirical evidence has revealed that representation learning plays a crucial role in endowing humans with such a capability. Inspired by this observation, we…

Since the 1960s, Democrats and Republicans in U.S. Congress have taken increasingly polarized positions, while the public's policy positions have remained centrist and moderate. We explain this apparent contradiction by developing a…

We consider elections where the voters come one at a time, in a streaming fashion, and devise space-efficient algorithms which identify an approximate winning committee with respect to common multiwinner proportional representation voting…

This work analyzes the distribution and size of interparticle gaps arising in an ensemble of hexagonal unit structures in the xy plane when packing disks with a Gaussian distribution of radii with mean (r) and standard deviation $\Delta r$.…

The increasing number of rectilinear floorplans in modern chip designs presents significant challenges for traditional macro placers due to the additional complexity introduced by blocked corners. Particularly, the widely adopted wirelength…

We form a "map of tournaments" by adapting the map framework from the world of elections. By a tournament we mean a complete directed graph where the nodes are the players and an edge points from a winner of a game to the loser (with no…

How to fairly apportion congressional seats to states has been debated for centuries. We present an alternative perspective on apportionment, centered not on states but "families" of state, sets of states with "divisor-method" quotas with…

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…

We focus on the scenario in which an agent can exploit his information advantage to manipulate the outcome of an election. In particular, we study district-based elections with two candidates, in which the winner of the election is the…

Many democratic political parties hold primary elections, which nicely reflects their democratic nature and promote, among other things, the democratic value of inclusiveness. However, the methods currently used for holding such primary…

CConsider a bipartite quantum system consisting of two subsystems A and B. The reduced density matrix ofA a is obtained by taking the partial trace with respect to B. In this work, we will show that the Wigner distribution of this reduced…