Related papers: Packed voters and cracked voters
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…
In the process of redistricting, one important metric is the number of competitive districts, that is, districts where both parties have a reasonable chance of winning a majority of votes. Competitive districts are important for achieving…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. The definition is flexible about the location or boundaries of the center. Using US survey data, the paper shows how this…
American democracy is currently heavily reliant on plurality in single-member districts, or PSMD, as a system of election. But public perceptions of fairness are often keyed to partisan proportionality, or the degree of congruence between…
Complexity of voting manipulation is a prominent topic in computational social choice. In this work, we consider a two-stage voting manipulation scenario. First, a malicious party (an attacker) attempts to manipulate the election outcome in…
We study the complexity of constructive bribery in the context of structured multiwinner approval elections. Given such an election, we ask whether a certain candidate can join the winning committee by adding, deleting, or swapping…
The Possible-Winner problem asks, given an election where the voters' preferences over the set of candidates is partially specified, whether a distinguished candidate can become a winner. In this work, we consider the computational…
We study the parameterized control complexity of fallback voting, a voting system that combines preference-based with approval voting. Electoral control is one of many different ways for an external agent to tamper with the outcome of an…
Voting is a very general method of preference aggregation. A voting rule takes as input every voter's vote (typically, a ranking of the alternatives), and produces as output either just the winning alternative or a ranking of the…
Hydrated granular packings often crack into discrete clusters of grains when dried. Despite its ubiquity, accurate prediction of cracking remains elusive. Here, we elucidate the previously overlooked role of individual grain shrinkage---a…
The American winner-take-all congressional district system empowers politicians to engineer electoral outcomes by manipulating district boundaries. Existing computational solutions mostly focus on drawing unbiased maps by ignoring political…
This article aims to present a unified framework for grading-based voting processes. The idea is to represent the grades of each voter on d candidates as a point in R^d and to define the winner of the vote using the deepest point of the…
Political actors often manipulate redistricting plans to gain electoral advantages, a process known as gerrymandering. Several states have implemented institutional reforms to address this problem, such as establishing map-drawing…
This preprint offers a detailed look, both qualitative and quantitative, at districting with respect to recent voting patterns in one state: Pennsylvania. We investigate how much the partisan playing field is tilted by political geography.…
Political districts may be drawn to favor one group or political party over another, or gerrymandered. A number of measurements have been suggested as ways to detect and prevent such behavior. These measures give concrete axes along which…
Previous work on voter control, which refers to situations where a chair seeks to change the outcome of an election by deleting, adding, or partitioning voters, takes for granted that the chair knows all the voters' preferences and that all…
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…
When voter preferences are known in an incomplete (partial) manner, winner determination is commonly treated as the identification of the necessary and possible winners; these are the candidates who win in all completions or at least one…
Although manipulation and bribery have been extensively studied under weighted voting, there has been almost no work done on election control under weighted voting. This is unfortunate, since weighted voting appears in many important…
The declination is a quantitative method for identifying possible partisan gerrymanders by analyzing vote distributions. In this expository note we explain and motivate the definition of the declination. The minimal computer code required…