Related papers: Spoiler Susceptibility in Party Elections

Integrity of elections is vital to democratic systems, but it is frequently threatened by malicious actors. The study of algorithmic complexity of the problem of manipulating election outcomes by changing its structural features is known as…

An important problem in computational social choice theory is the complexity of undesirable behavior among agents, such as control, manipulation, and bribery in election systems. These kinds of voting strategies are often tempting at the…

Election data represent a precious source of information to study human behavior at a large scale. In proportional elections with open lists, the number of votes received by a candidate, rescaled by the average performance of all…

Elections seem simple---aren't they just counting? But they have a unique, challenging combination of security and privacy requirements. The stakes are high; the context is adversarial; the electorate needs to be convinced that the results…

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…

Fairness in multiwinner elections is studied in varying contexts. For instance, diversity of candidates and representation of voters are both separately termed as being fair. A common denominator to ensure fairness across all such contexts…

We survey the design of elections that are resilient to attempted interference by third parties. For example, suppose votes have been cast in an election between two candidates, and then each vote is randomly changed with a small…

We develop a theory of distributive competition under redistricting that explains both electoral outcomes and the equilibrium allocation of policy benefits by endogenizing voter pivotality. In a multi-district model with primaries, general…

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 present a model for quantitatively identifying swing voters in congressional elections. This is achieved by predicting an individual voter's likelihood to vote and an individual voter's likelihood to vote for a given party, if he votes.…

Social networks are increasingly being used to conduct polls. We introduce a simple model of such social polling. We suppose agents vote sequentially, but the order in which agents choose to vote is not necessarily fixed. We also suppose…

To make a joint decision, agents (or voters) are often required to provide their preferences as linear orders. To determine a winner, the given linear orders can be aggregated according to a voting protocol. However, in realistic settings,…

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…

We use causal inference to study how designing ballots with and without party designations impacts electoral outcomes when partisan voters rely on party-order cues to infer candidate affiliation in races without designations. If the party…

In a party-based election system, the voters are grouped into parties and all voters of a party are assumed to vote according to the party preferences over the candidates. Hence, once the party preferences are declared the outcome of the…

In Spatial Voting Theory, distortion is a measure of how good the winner is. It is proved that no deterministic voting mechanism can guarantee a distortion better than $3$, even for simple metrics such as a line. In this study, we wish to…

This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. The definition is flexible about the location or boundaries of the center. Using US survey data, the paper shows how this…

Democratic societies increasingly rely on communication networks to aggregate citizen preferences and information, yet these same networks can systematically mislead voters under certain conditions. We introduce an agent-based model that…

We analyze a type of voting paradox which we term an involvement paradox, in which a candidate who loses an election could be made into a winner if more of the candidate's non-supporters participated in the election, or a winner could be…

In many proportional parliamentary elections, electoral thresholds (typically 3-5%) are used to promote stability and governability by preventing the election of parties with very small representation. However, these thresholds often result…