Related papers: Locating the representational baseline: Republican…
Gerrymandering is the perversion of an election based on manipulation of voting district boundaries, and has been a historically important yet difficult task to analytically prove. We propose a Markov Chain Monte Carlo with Simulated…
We model Monroe's and Chamberlin and Courant's multiwinner voting systems as a certain resource allocation problem. We show that for many restricted variants of this problem, under standard complexity-theoretic assumptions, there are no…
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…
Many democratic societies have become more politically polarized, with the U.S. as the main example. The origins of this phenomenon are still not well-understood and subject to debate. To better understand the mechanisms underlying…
Motivated by the problem of partisan gerrymandering, we introduce an electoral system for a representative democracy called democratic cellular voting, designed to make modern packing and cracking strategies irrelevant by allowing districts…
U.S. presidential elections are decided by the Electoral College, established in 1789, and designed to mitigate potential risks arising from the collusion of large groups of citizens. A statewide winner-take-all popular voting system for…
We prove that for many ranks r<2m-2, random rank r mixed states in bipartite mxm systems have relatively high Schmidt numbers, which is based on algebraic-geometric separability criterion proved in [1]. This also means that the…
Modeling U.S. Congressional legislation and roll-call votes has received significant attention in previous literature. However, while legislators across 50 state governments and D.C. propose over 100,000 bills each year, and on average…
In the months leading up to political elections in the United States, forecasts are widespread and take on multiple forms, including projections of what party will win the popular vote, state ratings, and predictions of vote margins at the…
Mathematicians have traditionally been a select group of academics that produce high-impact ideas allowing substantial results in several fields of science. Throughout the past 35 years, undergraduates enrolling in mathematics or statistics…
Affective polarization and increasing social divisions affect social mixing and the spread of information across online and physical spaces, reinforcing social and electoral cleavages and influencing political outcomes. Here, using…
We present a model for quantitatively identifying swing voters in congressional elections. This is achieved by predicting an individual voter's likelihood to vote and an individual voter's likelihood to vote for a given party, if he votes.…
Switching from one electoral system to another one is frequently criticized by the opposition and is viewed as a means for the ruling party to stay in power. In particular, when the new electoral system is a parallel voting (or a…
Finding outlying elements in probability distributions can be a hard problem. Taking a real example from Voting Rights Act enforcement, we consider the problem of maximizing the number of simultaneous majority-minority districts in a…
We consider three algorithms for allocating parliamentary seats by proportional representation. The usual approach to describing such algorithms is to compute a quota of votes that each party uses to "acquire'' representatives. This kind of…
The median-voter hypothesis (MVH) predicts convergence of two party platforms across a one-dimensional political spectrum during majoritarian elections. From the viewpoint of the MVH, an explanation of polarization is that each election has…
There have been several instances in our nation's history in which the presidential candidate who received the most popular votes did not win the presidency. Using a principal components analysis of recent presidential elections, we…
Recently, a proposal has been advanced to detect unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering with a simple formula called the efficiency gap. The efficiency gap is now working its way towards a possible landmark case in the Supreme Court. This…
Democracy often fails to meet its ideals, and these failures may be made worse by electoral institutions. Unwanted outcomes include polarized institutions, unresponsive representatives, and the ability of a faction of voters to gain power…
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…