Related papers: Geometry, Inference, Complexity, and Democracy
Many democratic countries use district-based elections where there is a "seat" for each district in the governing body. In each district, the party whose candidate gets the maximum number of votes wins the corresponding seat. The result of…
Automated decision systems are increasingly used for consequential decision making -- for a variety of reasons. These systems often rely on sophisticated yet opaque models, which do not (or hardly) allow for understanding how or why a given…
Participatory budgeting, as a paradigm for democratic innovations, engages citizens in the distribution of a public budget to projects, which they propose and vote for implementation. So far, voting algorithms have been proposed and studied…
Motivated by putting empirical work based on (synthetic) election data on a more solid mathematical basis, we analyze six distances among elections, including, e.g., the challenging-to-compute but very precise swap distance and the distance…
The evolution of mathematics is shaped importantly by interestingness: researchers choose which problems to pursue, and students choose which problems to engage with, based on expectations of interest and challenge. As AI systems,…
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 design of fair voting rules has been addressed quite often in the literature. Still, the so-called inverse problem is not entirely resolved. We summarize some achievements in this direction and formulate explicit open questions and…
This paper presents a scoping review of algorithmic fairness research over the past fifteen years, utilising a dataset sourced from Web of Science, HEIN Online, FAccT and AIES proceedings. All articles come from the computer science and…
Politics today is largely about the art of messaging to influence the public, but the mathematical theory of messaging -- information and communication theory -- can turn this art into a precise analysis, both qualitative and quantitative,…
The American winner-take-all congressional district system empowers politicians to engineer electoral outcomes by manipulating district boundaries. Existing computational solutions mostly focus on drawing unbiased maps by ignoring political…
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…
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…
As granular data about elections and voters become available, redistricting simulation methods are playing an increasingly important role when legislatures adopt redistricting plans and courts determine their legality. These simulation…
A citizens' assembly is a group of people who are randomly selected to represent a larger population in a deliberation. While this approach has successfully strengthened democracy, it has certain limitations that suggest the need for…
Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…
Examination of precinct level data in US presidential elections reveals a correlation of large precincts and increased fraction of Republican votes. The large precinct bias is analyzed with respect to voter heterogeneity and voter…
While probability theory is normally applied to external environments, there has been some recent interest in probabilistic modeling of the outputs of computations that are too expensive to run. Since mathematical logic is a powerful tool…
We use the ``map of elections'' approach of Szufa et al. (AAMAS-2020) to analyze several well-known vote distributions. For each of them, we give an explicit formula or an efficient algorithm for computing its frequency matrix, which…
The objective of this article is to stimulate discussions in mathematical society about the role of mathematical departments in the life of the community. University community is the center of knowledge and promotes the intellectual…
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…