Related papers: Declination as a Metric to Detect Partisan Gerryma…

We consider a two-round election model involving $m$ voters and $n$ candidates. Each voter is endowed with a strict preference list ranking the candidates. In the first round, the candidates are partitioned into two subsets, $A$ and $B$,…

Selecting representatives based on voters' preferences is a fundamental problem in social choice theory. While cardinal utility functions offer a detailed representation of preferences, ordinal rankings are often the only available…

In the metric distortion problem, a set of voters and candidates lie in a common metric space, and a committee of $k$ candidates must be elected. The objective is to minimize a social cost, defined as a function of the distances between…

We consider the distributed single-winner metric voting problem on a line, where agents and alternative are represented by points on the line of real numbers, the agents are partitioned into disjoint districts, and the goal is to choose a…

Algorithmic and statistical approaches to congressional redistricting are becoming increasingly valuable tools in courts and redistricting commissions for quantifying gerrymandering in the United States. While there is existing literature…

We design and analyze a protocol for dividing a state into districts, where parties take turns proposing a division, and freezing a district from the other party's proposed division. We show that our protocol has predictable and provable…

We study the problem of minimizing metric distortion in multi-winner elections, where a committee of size $k$ is selected from a set of candidates based on voters' ordinal preferences. We assume that voters and candidates are embedded on a…

We measure polarization in the United States Congress using the network science concept of modularity. Modularity provides a conceptually-clear measure of polarization that reveals both the number of relevant groups and the strength of…

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…

We model voting behaviour in the multi-group setting of a two-tier voting system using sequences of de Finetti measures. Our model is defined by using the de Finetti representation of a probability measure (i.e. as a mixture of…

We consider the following well-studied problem of metric distortion in social choice. Suppose we have an election with $n$ voters and $m$ candidates located in a shared metric space. We would like to design a voting rule that chooses a…

"Compactness," or the use of shape as a proxy for fairness, has been a long-running theme in the scrutiny of electoral districts; badly-shaped districts are often flagged as examples of the abuse of power known as gerrymandering. The most…

We present a novel approach to the measurement of American state legislature polarization with an experimental comparison of three different machine learning algorithms. Our approach strictly relies on public data sources and open source…

Elections, the cornerstone of democratic societies, are usually regarded as unpredictable due to the complex interactions that shape them at different levels. In this work, we show that voter turnouts contain crucial information that can be…

Rapid progress in representation learning has led to a proliferation of embedding models, and to associated challenges of model selection and practical application. It is non-trivial to assess a model's generalizability to new, candidate…

While manipulative attacks on elections have been well-studied, only recently has attention turned to attacks that account for geographic information, which are extremely common in the real world. The most well known in the media is…

The most prevalent notions of fairness in machine learning are statistical definitions: they fix a small collection of pre-defined groups, and then ask for parity of some statistic of the classifier across these groups. Constraints of this…

In real-world elections where voters cast preference ballots, voters often provide only a partial ranking of the candidates. Despite this empirical reality, prior social choice literature frequently analyzes fairness criteria under the…

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…

Low isometric distortion is often required for mesh parameterizations. A configuration of some vertices, where the distortion is concentrated, provides a way to mitigate isometric distortion, but determining the number and placement of…