Related papers: Measuring Political Gerrymandering
The outcome of an election depends not only on which candidate is more popular, but also on how many of their voters actually turn out to vote. Here we consider a simple model in which voters abstain from voting if they think their vote…
Democratic societies are built around the principle of free and fair elections, that each citizen's vote should count equal. National elections can be regarded as large-scale social experiments, where people are grouped into usually large…
Our infrastructure systems enable our well-being by allowing us to move, store, and transform materials and information given considerable social and environmental variation. Critically, this ability is shaped by the degree to which society…
Collective decision making is often a customary action taken in government crowdsourcing. Through ensemble of opinions (popularly known as judgment analysis), governments can satisfy majority of the people who provided opinions. This has…
Inefficient markets allow investors to consistently outperform the market. To demonstrate that inefficiencies exist in sports betting markets, we created a betting algorithm that generates above market returns for the NFL, NBA, NCAAF,…
The proposed election system lies in ensuring that it is transparent and impartial.Thus while the electoral system may vary from country to country, It has to take into account the peculiarities of every society while at the same time…
The increasing cost of electoral campaigns raises the need for effective campaign planning and a precise understanding of the return of such investment. Interestingly, despite the strong impact of elections on our daily lives, how this…
The Kemeny aggregation problem consists of computing the consensus rankings of an election with respect to the well-known Kemeny-Young voting method. These consensus rankings satisfy various fundamental properties and are the geometric…
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…
We revisit a recently introduced power spectrum estimation technique based on Gibbs sampling, with the goal of applying it to the high-resolution WMAP data. In order to facilitate this analysis, a number of sophistications have to be…
To audit political district maps for partisan gerrymandering, one may determine a baseline for the expected distribution of partisan outcomes by sampling an ensemble of maps. One approach to sampling is to use redistricting policy as a…
This paper presents mathematics relevant to the question whether voting should be mandatory. Assuming a static distribution of voters' political beliefs, we model how politicians might adjust their positions to raise their share of the…
In this paper we discuss the problems of modern representative democracy and we look at the selection of legislators by lot as a way to tame some of the drawbacks of that system. It is recalled at the beginning that resorting to sortition…
Several elections run in the last years have been characterized by attempts to manipulate the result of the election through the diffusion of fake or malicious news over social networks. This problem has been recognized as a critical issue…
The margin of victory is easy to compute for many election schemes but difficult for Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). This is important because arguments about the correctness of an election outcome usually rely on the size of the electoral…
We propose two opposing forces that impact the relation between electoral integrity and poverty. On the one hand, it is more costly to provide electoral integrity in states where there is more poverty due to transaction costs and…
The legitimacy of bottom-up democratic processes for the distribution of public funds by policy-makers is challenging and complex. Participatory budgeting is such a process, where voting outcomes may not always be fair or inclusive.…
The challenge of understanding the collective behaviors of social systems can benefit from methods and concepts from physics [1-6], not because humans are similar to electrons, but because certain large-scale behaviors can be understood…
We study the ability of a social media platform with a political agenda to influence voting outcomes. Our benchmark is Condorcet's jury theorem, which states that the likelihood of a correct decision under majority voting increases with the…
Mutual coherence is a measure of similarity between two opinions. Although the notion comes from philosophy, it is essential for a wide range of technologies, e.g., the Wahl-O-Mat system. In Germany, this system helps voters to find…