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We survey the design of elections that are resilient to attempted interference by third parties. For example, suppose votes have been cast in an election between two candidates, and then each vote is randomly changed with a small…
While the benefits of common and public goods are shared, they tend to be scarce when contributions are provided voluntarily. Failure to cooperate in the provision or preservation of these goods is fundamental to sustainability challenges,…
We develop and apply epistemic tests to various decentralized governance methods as well as to study the impact of participation. These tests probe the ability to reach a correct outcome when there is one. We find that partial abstention is…
LLMs are among the most advanced tools ever devised for understanding and generating natural language. Democratic deliberation and decision-making involve, at several distinct stages, the production and comprehension of language. So it is…
Constructive election control considers the problem of an adversary who seeks to sway the outcome of an electoral process in order to ensure that their favored candidate wins. We consider the computational problem of constructive election…
Switching from one electoral system to another one is frequently criticized by the opposition and is viewed as a means for the ruling party to stay in power. In particular, when the new electoral system is a parallel voting (or a…
The two most common types of electoral systems (ES) used in electing national legislatures are proportional representation and plurality voting. When they are evaluated, most often the arguments come from social choice theory and political…
In this paper, we study the problem of Participatory Budgeting (PB) with approval ballots, inspired by Multi-Winner Voting schemes. We present generalized preference aggregation methods for participatory budgeting, especially for finding…
Humans have come to rely on machines for reducing excessive information to manageable representations. But this reliance can be abused -- strategic machines might craft representations that manipulate their users. How can a user make good…
Classical spatial models predict platform convergence, yet empirical polarization persists. This paper proposes a non-electoral mechanism: lobbying as a monopsonistic market for legislative support. Here, extreme benefactors must pay more…
Viscous democracy is a generalization of liquid democracy, a social choice framework in which voters may transitively delegate their votes. In viscous democracy, a "viscosity" factor decreases the weight of a delegation the further it…
A large body of empirical evidence suggests that humans are willing to engage in costly punishment of defectors in public goods games. Based on such pieces of evidence, it is suggested that punishment serves an important role in promoting…
We consider an agent community wishing to decide on several binary issues by means of issue-by-issue majority voting. For each issue and each agent, one of the two options is better than the other. However, some of the agents may be…
Crowdsourcing provides a popular paradigm for data collection at scale. We study the problem of selecting subsets of workers from a given worker pool to maximize the accuracy under a budget constraint. One natural question is whether we…
{\em Distortion} is a well-established notion for quantifying the loss of social welfare that may occur in voting. As voting rules take as input only ordinal information, they are essentially forced to neglect the exact values the agents…
Do robots vote? Do machines make decisions instead of us? No, (at least not yet), but this is something that could happen. The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on democracy is a complex issue that requires thorough research and…
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…
Any community in which membership is optional may eventually break apart, or fork. For example, forks may occur in political parties, business partnerships, social groups, cryptocurrencies, and federated governing bodies. Forking is…
We introduce a non-partisan probability distribution on congressional redistricting of North Carolina which emphasizes the equal partition of the population and the compactness of districts. When random districts are drawn and the results…
The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…