Related papers: ODEs and Mandatory Voting
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,…
Do robots vote? Do machines make decisions instead of us? No, (at least not yet), but this is something that could happen. The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on democracy is a complex issue that requires thorough research and…
The proportional veto principle, which captures the idea that a candidate vetoed by a large group of voters should not be chosen, has been studied for ranked ballots in single-winner voting. We introduce a version of this principle for…
In social choice theory with ordinal preferences, a voting method satisfies the axiom of positive involvement if adding to a preference profile a voter who ranks an alternative uniquely first cannot cause that alternative to go from winning…
In the context of voting with ranked ballots, an important class of voting rules is the class of margin-based rules (also called pairwise rules). A voting rule is margin-based if whenever two elections generate the same head-to-head margins…
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…
We argue for a foundational epistemic claim and a hypothesis about the production and uses of mathematical epidemiological models, exploring the consequences for our political and socio-economic lives. First, in order to make the best use…
We consider the notions of agreement, diversity, and polarization in ordinal elections (that is, in elections where voters rank the candidates). While (computational) social choice offers good measures of agreement between the voters, such…
Multiwinner voting rules are used to select a small representative subset of candidates or items from a larger set given the preferences of voters. However, if candidates have sensitive attributes such as gender or ethnicity (when selecting…
How should one combine noisy information from diverse sources to make an inference about an objective ground truth? This frequently recurring, normative question lies at the core of statistics, machine learning, policy-making, and everyday…
We consider the approval-based model of elections, and undertake a computational study of voting rules which select committees whose size is not predetermined. While voting rules that output committees with a predetermined number of winning…
We study elections where voters are faced with the challenge of expressing preferences over an extreme number of issues under consideration. This is largely motivated by emerging blockchain governance systems, which include voters with…
Candidate control of elections is the study of how adding or removing candidates can affect the outcome. However, the traditional study of the complexity of candidate control is in the model in which all candidates and votes are known up…
In the traditional voting manipulation literature, it is assumed that a group of manipulators jointly misrepresent their preferences to get a certain candidate elected, while the remaining voters are truthful. In this paper, we depart from…
We study the behavior of Range Voting and Normalized Range Voting with respect to electoral control. Electoral control encompasses attempts from an election chair to alter the structure of an election in order to change the outcome. We show…
In this paper we extend the principle of proportional representation to rankings. We consider the setting where alternatives need to be ranked based on approval preferences. In this setting, proportional representation requires that…
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…
We examine vote delegation when preferences of agents are private information. One group of agents (delegators) does not want to participate in voting and abstains under conventional voting or can delegate its votes to the other group…
Voting methods are instrumental design elements of democracies. Citizens use them to express and aggregate their preferences to reach a collective decision. However, voting outcomes can be as sensitive to voting rules as they are to…
Voting systems typically treat all voters equally. We argue that perhaps they should not: Voters who have supported good choices in the past should be given higher weight than voters who have supported bad ones. To develop a formal…