Related papers: Packed voters and cracked voters
Congressional district lines in many U.S. states are drawn by partisan actors, raising concerns about gerrymandering. To separate the partisan effects of redistricting from the effects of other factors including geography and redistricting…
In computational social choice, the distortion of a voting rule quantifies the degree to which the rule overcomes limited preference information to select a socially desirable outcome. This concept has been investigated extensively, but…
An electoral spoiler is usually defined as a losing candidate whose removal would affect the outcome by changing the winner. So far, spoiler effects have been analyzed primarily for single-winner electoral systems. We consider this subject…
We consider distributed elections, where there is a center and $k$ sites. In such distributed elections, each voter has preferences over some set of candidates, and each voter is assigned to exactly one site such that each site is aware…
Gerrymandering is a long-standing issue within the U.S. political system, and it has received scrutiny recently by the U.S. Supreme Court. In this note, we prove that deciding whether there exists a fair redistricting among legal maps is…
It is important to study how strategic agents can affect the outcome of an election. There has been a long line of research in the computational study of elections on the complexity of manipulative actions such as manipulation and bribery.…
North Carolina's constitution requires that state legislative districts should not split counties. However, counties must be split to comply with the "one person, one vote" mandate of the U.S. Supreme Court. Given that counties must be…
In elections, a set of candidates ranked consecutively (though possibly in different order) by all voters is called a clone set, and its members are called clones. A clone structure is a family of all clone sets of a given election. In this…
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 develop a theory of distributive competition under redistricting that explains both electoral outcomes and the equilibrium allocation of policy benefits by endogenizing voter pivotality. In a multi-district model with primaries, general…
The gerrymandering problem is a worldwide problem which sets great threat to democracy and justice in district based elections. Thanks to partisan redistricting commissions, district boundaries are often manipulated to benefit incumbents.…
Accounting for undecided and uncertain voters is a challenging issue for predicting election results from public opinion polls. Undecided voters typify the uncertainty of swing voters in polls but are often ignored or allocated to each…
We investigate whether one can determine from the transcripts of U.S. Congressional floor debates whether the speeches represent support of or opposition to proposed legislation. To address this problem, we exploit the fact that these…
We generalize the well-known broken stick problem in several ways, including a discrete "brick" analogue and a sequential "pick-up sticks/bricks" version. The limit behavior of the broken brick problem gives a combinatorial proof of the…
In recent years, in an effort to promote fairness in the election process, a wide variety of techniques and metrics have been proposed to determine whether a map is a partisan gerrymander. The most accessible measures, requiring easily…
This paper formalizes the lattice structure of the ballot voters cast in a ranked-choice election and the preferences that this structure induces. These preferences are shown to be counter to previous assumptions about the preferences of…
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…
Many people believe that it is disadvantageous for members aligning with a minority party to cluster in cities, as this makes it easier for the majority party to gerrymander district boundaries to diminish the representation of the…
The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem implies the existence of voters, called manipulators, who can change the election outcome in their favour by voting strategically. When a given preference profile admits several such manipulators, voting…
How does targeted advertising influence electoral outcomes? This paper presents a one-dimensional spatial model of voting in which a privately informed challenger persuades voters to support him over the status quo. I show that targeted…