Related papers: Risk-Limiting Audits for Condorcet Elections
Election systems based on scores generally determine the winner by computing the score of each candidate and the winner is the candidate with the best score. It would be natural to expect that computing the winner of an election is at least…
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) are post-election auditing procedures that rigorously guarantee a specified maximum probability that an incorrect electoral outcome will not be detected. Aside from ready access to physical ballots, known RLAs…
Elections and opinion polls often have many candidates, with the aim to either rank the candidates or identify a small set of winners according to voters' preferences. In practice, voters do not provide a full ranking; instead, each voter…
The voting method, an ensemble approach for fundamental frequency estimation, is empirically known for its robustness but lacks thorough investigation. This paper provides a principled analysis and improvement of this technique. First, we…
A well-studied randomized election algorithm proceeds as follows: In each round the remaining candidates each toss a coin and leave the competition if they obtain heads. Of interest is the number of rounds required and the number of…
By classic results in social choice theory, any reasonable preferential voting method sometimes gives individuals an incentive to report an insincere preference. The extent to which different voting methods are more or less resistant to…
We present a method and software for ballot-polling risk-limiting audits (RLAs) based on Bernoulli sampling: ballots are included in the sample with probability $p$, independently. Bernoulli sampling has several advantages: (1) it does not…
Ranked choice voting is vulnerable to monotonicity failure - a voting failure where a candidate is cost an election due to losing voter preference or granted an election due to gaining voter preference. Despite increasing use of ranked…
It is well known, by the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem, that when there are more than two candidates, any non-dictatorial voting rule can be manipulated by untruthful voters. But how strong is the incentive to manipulate under different…
The budget is the key means for effecting policy in democracies, yet its preparation is typically an excluding, opaque, and arcane process. We aim to rectify this by providing for the democratic creation of complete budgets --- for…
We present a novel approach to the core set/instance selection problem in machine learning. Our approach is based on recent results on (proportional) representation in approval-based multi-winner elections. In our model, instances play a…
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) can provide routine, affirmative evidence that reported election outcomes are correct by checking a random sample of cast ballots. An efficient RLA requires checking relatively few ballots. Here we construct…
We study how office-seeking parties use direct democracy to shape elections. A party with a strong electoral base can benefit from using a binding referendum to resolve issues that divide its core supporters. When referendums do not bind,…
In an election in which each voter ranks all of the candidates, we consider the head-to-head results between each pair of candidates and form a labeled directed graph, called the margin graph, which contains the margin of victory of each…
U.S. elections rely heavily on computers such as voter registration databases, electronic pollbooks, voting machines, scanners, tabulators, and results reporting websites. These introduce digital threats to election outcomes. Risk-limiting…
Pull voting is a random process in which vertices of a connected graph have initial opinions chosen from a set of $k$ distinct opinions, and at each step a random vertex alters its opinion to that of a randomly chosen neighbour. If the…
We study positional voting rules when candidates and voters are embedded in a common metric space, and cardinal preferences are naturally given by distances in the metric space. In a positional voting rule, each candidate receives a score…
The methods of single transferable vote (STV) and sequential ranked-choice voting (RCV) are different methods for electing a set of winners in multiwinner elections. STV is a classical voting method that has been widely used internationally…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting. Moreover, scenarios such as committee or board elections require voting rules that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent may vote…