Related papers: Packed voters and cracked voters
In voting contexts, some new candidates may show up in the course of the process. In this case, we may want to determine which of the initial candidates are possible winners, given that a fixed number $k$ of new candidates will be added. We…
A "repeat voting" procedure is proposed, whereby voting is carried out in two identical rounds. Every voter can vote in each round, the results of the first round are made public before the second round, and the final result is determined…
We introduce the notion of {\em Distance Restricted Manipulation}, where colluding manipulator(s) need to compute if there exist votes which make their preferred alternative win the election when their knowledge about the others' votes is a…
The idea of liquid democracy responds to a widely-felt desire to make democracy more "fluid" and continuously participatory. Its central premise is to enable users to employ networked technologies to control and delegate voting power, to…
We study the parameterized complexity of the optimal defense and optimal attack problems in voting. In both the problems, the input is a set of voter groups (every voter group is a set of votes) and two integers $k_a$ and $k_d$…
In ranked-choice elections voters cast preference ballots which provide a voter's ranking of the candidates. The method of ranked-choice voting (RCV) chooses a winner by using voter preferences to simulate a series of runoff elections. Some…
An election over a finite set of candidates is called single-crossing if, as we sweep through the list of voters from left to right, the relative order of every pair of candidates changes at most once. Such elections have many attractive…
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…
This paper quantitatively analyzes county-level voting patterns in Wisconsin's presidential elections from 2000 to 2024. As a pivotal swing state, Wisconsin has alternated between Democratic and Republican candidates since 2012. Using data…
Geographical considerations such as contiguity and compactness are necessary elements of political districting in practice. Yet an analysis of the problem without such constraints yields mathematical insights that can inform real-world…
The related concepts of partisan belief systems, issue alignment, and partisan sorting are central to our understanding of politics. These phenomena have been studied using measures of alignment between pairs of topics, or how much…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. By being flexible about the location or width of the center, this measure enables the researcher to analyze polarization…
In many practical scenarios, a population is divided into disjoint groups for better administration, e.g., electorates into political districts, employees into departments, students into school districts, and so on. However, grouping people…
There is growing evidence of systematic attempts to influence democratic elections by controlled and digitally organized dissemination of fake news. This raises the question of the intrinsic robustness of democratic electoral processes…
Most work on manipulation assumes that all preferences are known to the manipulators. However, in many settings elections are open and sequential, and manipulators may know the already cast votes but may not know the future votes. We…
Understanding when and how computational complexity can be used to protect elections against different manipulative actions has been a highly active research area over the past two decades. A recent body of work, however, has shown that…
In approval-based multiwinner voting, voters express approval preferences over a set of candidates, and the goal is to return a winning committee. This model captures a broad range of subset selection problems under preferences. Prior work…
The topic of this paper is "gerrymandering", namely the curse of deliberate creations of district maps with highly asymmetric electoral outcomes to disenfranchise voters, and it has a long legal history. Measuring and eliminating…
The constrained voter model describes the dynamics of opinions in a population of individuals located on a connected graph. Each agent is characterized by her opinion, where the set of opinions is represented by a finite sequence of…
We propose new methods of electoral statistics. With their help, we study transcripts of vote counting in municipal elections. We construct and apply effective statistical tests to detect the ballot stuffing at the level of individual…