Related papers: Declination as a Metric to Detect Partisan Gerryma…
Democratic societies are built around the principle of free and fair elections, that each citizen's vote should count equal. National elections can be regarded as large-scale social experiments, where people are grouped into usually large…
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…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
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…
Post-election audits use the discrepancy between machine counts and a hand tally of votes in a random sample of precincts to infer whether error affected the electoral outcome. The maximum relative overstatement of pairwise margins (MRO)…
The process of drawing electoral district boundaries is known as political redistricting. Within this context, gerrymandering is the practice of drawing these boundaries such that they unfairly favor a particular political party, often…
We introduce a new statistical test based on the observed spacings of ordered data. The statistic is sensitive to detect non-uniformity in random samples, or short-lived features in event time series. Under some conditions, this new test…
We study in details the turnout rate statistics for 77 elections in 11 different countries. We show that the empirical results established in a previous paper for French elections appear to hold much more generally. We find in particular…
The boundaries of electoral constituencies for assembly and parliamentary seats are drafted using a process referred to as delimitation, which ensures fair and equal representation of all citizens. The current delimitation exercise suffers…
Consider the following social choice problem. Suppose we have a set of $n$ voters and $m$ candidates that lie in a metric space. The goal is to design a mechanism to choose a candidate whose average distance to the voters is as small as…
The U.S. Supreme Court is currently deliberating over whether a proposed mathematical formula should be used to detect unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering. We show that in some cases, this formula will only flag bizarrely shaped…
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…
We study the performance of voting mechanisms from a utilitarian standpoint, under the recently introduced framework of metric-distortion, offering new insights along three main lines. First, if $d$ represents the doubling dimension of the…
We consider elections where the voters come one at a time, in a streaming fashion, and devise space-efficient algorithms which identify an approximate winning committee with respect to common multiwinner proportional representation voting…
We revisit the recent breakthrough result of Gkatzelis et al. on (single-winner) metric voting, which showed that the optimal distortion of 3 can be achieved by a mechanism called Plurality Matching. The rule picks an arbitrary candidate…
In this paper, we develop the metric geometry of ranking statistics, proving that the two major permutation distances in the statistics literature -- Kendall tau and Spearman footrule -- extend naturally to incomplete rankings with both…
We introduce an even-parity precession protocol that can detect the nonclassicality of some quantum states using only measurements of a uniformly-precessing variable at different points in time. Depending on the system under study, the…
This past decade has seen a noticeable uptick in asymmetric election results along with the inevitable claims of gerrymandering and litigation. Research, too, has followed, giving rise to intense scrutiny of elections, where the goal is to…
Metric distortion in social choice is a framework for evaluating how well voting rules minimize social cost when both voters and candidates exist in a shared metric space, with a voter's cost defined by their distance to a candidate. Voters…
The Hotelling-Downs model considers parties changing policy to maximise their vote-share. Where policy position lies on a left-right axis, it describes a tendency for political parties to move towards centrist platforms. This is in contrast…