Related papers: Nonparametric Detection of Gerrymandering in Multi…
We present an alternative voting system that aims at bridging the gap between proportional representative systems and majoritarian, single winner election systems. The system lets people vote for multiple parties, but then assigns each…
We study the problem of a partisan gerrymanderer who assigns voters to equipopulous districts so as to maximize his party's expected seat share. The designer faces both aggregate uncertainty (how many votes his party will receive) and…
On the basis of a formula for calculating seat shares and natural thresholds in multidistrict elections under the Jefferson-D'Hondt system and a probabilistic model of electoral behavior based on P\'{o}lya's urn model, we propose a new…
Strategic manipulation of elections is typically studied in the context of promoting individual candidates. In parliamentary elections, however, the focus shifts: voters may care more about the overall governing coalition than the…
Deciding whether a political districting plan was distorted by a hidden agenda, or whether it dilutes the voting power of some group, requires a neutral baseline for comparison. Remarkably, all nine U.S. Supreme Court justices have now…
In representative democracy, a redistricting map is chosen to partition an electorate into districts which each elects a representative. A valid redistricting map must satisfy a collection of constraints such as being compact, contiguous,…
Consider an election where N seats are distributed among parties with proportions p_1,...,p_m of the votes. We study, for the common divisor and quota methods, the asymptotic distribution, and in particular the mean, of the seat excess of a…
Using an ensemble of redistricting plans, we evaluate whether a given political districting faithfully represents the geo-political landscape. Redistricting plans are sampled by a Monte Carlo algorithm from a probability distribution that…
Manipulation is a problem of fundamental importance in the context of voting in which the voters exercise their votes strategically instead of voting honestly to prevent selection of an alternative that is less preferred. The…
The recent wave of attention to partisan gerrymandering has come with a push to refine or replace the laws that govern political redistricting around the country. A common element in several states' reform efforts has been the inclusion of…
We consider a two-round election model involving $m$ voters and $n$ candidates. Each voter is endowed with a strict preference list ranking the candidates. In the first round, the candidates are partitioned into two subsets, $A$ and $B$,…
Most democratic countries use election methods to transform election results into whole numbers which usually give the number of seats in a legislative body the parties obtained. Which election method does this best can be specified by…
We consider the problem of protecting and manipulating elections by recounting and changing ballots, respectively. Our setting involves a plurality-based election held across multiple districts, and the problem formulations are based on the…
Congressional district lines in many U.S. states are drawn by partisan actors, raising concerns about gerrymandering. To separate the partisan effects of redistricting from the effects of other factors including geography and redistricting…
Here we present \texttt{electoral\_sim}, an open-source Python framework for simulating and comparing electoral systems across diverse voter preference distributions. The framework represents voters and candidates as points in a…
We provide a systematic method for nonlinear entanglement detection based on trace polynomial inequalities. In particular, this allows to employ multi-partite witnesses for the detection of bipartite states, and vice versa. We identify…
The paper considers the problem of finding the number of dominant voters in two-level voting procedures. At the first stage, voting is conducted among local groups of voters, and at the second stage, the results are aggregated to form a…
We focus on the scenario in which an agent can exploit his information advantage to manipulate the outcome of an election. In particular, we study district-based elections with two candidates, in which the winner of the election is the…
Voter fraud in the United States is rare and the vote-counting system is robust against tampering, but there remains widespread distrust in the security of election infrastructure among the public. We consider statistical means of detecting…
Political districts may be drawn to favor one group or political party over another, or gerrymandered. A number of measurements have been suggested as ways to detect and prevent such behavior. These measures give concrete axes along which…