Related papers: The distortion of distributed 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…
This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…
The paper considers a general model of electoral systems combining district-based elections with a compensatory mechanism in order to create any outcome between strictly majoritarian and purely proportional seat allocation. It contains vote…
This study investigates adversarial attacks conducted to distort voter model dynamics in complex networks. Specifically, a simple adversarial attack method is proposed to hold the state of opinions of an individual closer to the target…
In modern democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events are the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such large…
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…
Social media platforms allow users to create polls to gather public opinion on diverse topics. However, we know little about what such polls are used for and how reliable they are, especially in significant contexts like elections. Focusing…
In a district-based election, we apply a voting rule $r$ to decide the winners in each district, and a candidate who wins in a maximum number of districts is the winner of the election. We present efficient sampling-based algorithms to…
Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the…
We explore the voter model dynamics on a directed random graph model ensemble (digraphs), given by the Directed Configuration Model. The voter model captures the evolution of opinions over time on a graph where each vertex represents an…
Several measures of partisan bias are reviewed for single member districts with two dominant parties. These include variants of the simple bias that considers only deviation of seats from 50% at statewide 50% vote. Also included are…
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…
Despite many examples to the contrary, most models of elections assume that rules determining the winner will be followed. We present a model where elections are solely a public signal of the incumbent popularity, and citizens can protests…
Public opinion polling is usually done by random sampling from the entire population, treating individual opinions as independent. In the real world, individuals' opinions are often correlated, e.g., among friends in a social network. In…
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…
In this article, we study the effect of vector-valued interventions in votes under a binary voter model, where each voter expresses their vote as a $0-1$ valued random variable to choose between two candidates. We assume that the outcome is…
We study higher statistical moments of Distortion for randomized social choice in a metric implicit utilitarian model. The Distortion of a social choice mechanism is the expected approximation factor with respect to the optimal utilitarian…
Voting methods are instrumental design elements of democracies. Citizens use them to express and aggregate their preferences to reach a collective decision. However, voting outcomes can be as sensitive to voting rules as they are to…
The goal of this paper is twofold. First and foremost, we aim to experimentally and quantitatively show that the choice of a multiwinner voting rule can play a crucial role on the way minorities are represented. We also test the possibility…
We introduce a general framework for exploring the problem of selecting a committee of representatives with the aim of studying a networked voting rule based on a decentralized large-scale platform, which can assure a strong accountability…