Related papers: Measuring Political Gerrymandering
The actions of packing and cracking are central to the construction of gerrymandered district plans. The US Supreme Court opinion in Gill v. Whitford makes clear that vote dilution arguments require showing that individual voters have been…
Selecting representatives based on voters' preferences is a fundamental problem in social choice theory. While cardinal utility functions offer a detailed representation of preferences, ordinal rankings are often the only available…
The margin of victory of an election is a useful measure to capture the robustness of an election outcome. It also plays a crucial role in determining the sample size of various algorithms in post election audit, polling etc. In this work,…
We initiate the study of bribery problem in the context of gerrymandering and reverse gerrymandering. In our most general problem, the input is a set of voters having votes over a set of alternatives, a graph on the voters, a partition of…
In this paper, we develop the metric geometry of ranking statistics, proving that the two major permutation distances in the statistics literature -- Kendall tau and Spearman footrule -- extend naturally to incomplete rankings with both…
The problem of how to allocate to states the seats in the US House of Representatives is the most studied instance of what is termed the `apportionment problem'. We propose a new method of apportionment which is stochastic, which meets the…
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 two symmetry metrics commonly used to analyze partisan gerrymandering: the Mean-Median Difference (MM) and Partisan Bias (PB). Our main results compare, for combinations of seats and votes achievable in districted elections, 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 an election in which each voter ranks all of the candidates, we consider the head-to-head results between each pair of candidates and form a labeled directed graph, called the margin graph, which contains the margin of victory of each…
In this paper, we apply genetic algorithms to the field of electoral studies. Forecasting election results is one of the most exciting and demanding tasks in the area of market research, especially due to the fact that decisions have to be…
Building on developments in machine learning and prior work in the science of judicial prediction, we construct a model designed to predict the behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States in a generalized, out-of-sample context. To…
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…
A national voting population, when segmented into groups like, for example, different states, can yield a counter-intuitive scenario where the winner may not necessarily get the most number of total votes. A recent example is the 2016…
The distribution of numbers in human documents is determined by a variety of diverse natural and human factors, whose relative significance can be evaluated by studying the numbers' frequency of occurrence. Although it has been studied…
Assuming that partisan fairness and responsiveness are important aspects of redistricting, it is important to measure them. Many measures of partisan bias are satisfactory for states that are balanced with roughly equal proportions of…
Today, our more-than-ever digital lives leave significant footprints in cyberspace. Large scale collections of these socially generated footprints, often known as big data, could help us to re-investigate different aspects of our social…
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…
We provide mechanisms and new metric distortion bounds for line-up elections. In such elections, a set of $n$ voters, $m$ candidates, and $\ell$ positions are all located in a metric space. The goal is to choose a set of candidates and…
Integrity of elections is vital to democratic systems, but it is frequently threatened by malicious actors. The study of algorithmic complexity of the problem of manipulating election outcomes by changing its structural features is known as…