Related papers: Spoiler Susceptibility in Party Elections
We study the setting of single-winner elections with ordinal preferences where candidates might be members of \emph{alliances} (which may correspond to e.g., political parties, factions, or coalitions). However, we do not assume that…
In the popular debate over the use of ranked-choice voting, it is often claimed that the method of single transferable vote (STV) is immune or mostly immune to the so-called ``spoiler effect,'' where the removal of a losing candidate…
We examine the effects of introducing a political outsider to the nomination process leading to an election. To this end, we develop a sequential game where politicians -- insiders and outsiders -- make a platform offer to a party, and…
In the United States electoral system, a candidate is elected indirectly by winning a majority of electoral votes cast by individual states, the election usually being decided by the votes cast by a small number of "swing states" where the…
Coalitional manipulation in voting is considered to be any scenario in which a group of voters decide to misrepresent their vote in order to secure an outcome they all prefer to the first outcome of the election when they vote honestly. The…
The integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
Election control considers the problem of an adversary who attempts to tamper with a voting process, in order to either ensure that their favored candidate wins (constructive control) or another candidate loses (destructive control). As…
Strategic voting, or manipulation, is the process by which a voter misrepresents his preferences in an attempt to elect an outcome that he considers preferable to the outcome under sincere voting. It is generally agreed that manipulation is…
Mechanism design is concerned with settings where a policymaker (or social planner) faces the problem of aggregating the announced preferences of multiple agents into a collective (or social), system-wide decision. One of the most important…
Voting by sequential elimination is a low-communication voting protocol: voters play in sequence and eliminate one or more of the remaining candidates, until only one remains. While the fairness and efficiency of such protocols have been…
For centuries, it has been widely believed that the influence of a small coalition of voters is negligible in a large election. Consequently, there is a large body of literature on characterizing the likelihood for an election to be…
The probability of a given candidate winning a future election is worked out in closed form as a function of (i) the current support rates for each candidate, (ii) the relative positioning of the candidates within the political spectrum,…
In a country with many elections, it may prove economically expedient to hold multiple elections simultaneously on a common polling date. We show that in a polarized society, in which each voter has a preferred party, an increase in the…
We propose a Condorcet consistent voting method that we call Split Cycle. Split Cycle belongs to the small family of known voting methods satisfying the anti-vote-splitting criterion of independence of clones. In this family, only Split…
Online social networks are used to diffuse opinions and ideas among users, enabling a faster communication and a wider audience. The way in which opinions are conditioned by social interactions is usually called social influence. Social…
We study the complexity of influencing elections through bribery: How computationally complex is it for an external actor to determine whether by a certain amount of bribing voters a specified candidate can be made the election's winner? We…
Much of the theoretical work on strategic voting makes strong assumptions about what voters know about the voting situation. A strategizing voter is typically assumed to know how other voters will vote and to know the rules of the voting…
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…