Related papers: Vulnerability of democratic electoral systems
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…
The paper considers a general model of electoral systems combining district-based elections with a compensatory mechanism in order to create any outcome between strictly majoritarian and purely proportional seat allocation. It contains vote…
Our infrastructure systems enable our well-being by allowing us to move, store, and transform materials and information given considerable social and environmental variation. Critically, this ability is shaped by the degree to which society…
Understanding the nature of strategic voting is the holy grail of social choice theory, where game-theory, social science and recently computational approaches are all applied in order to model the incentives and behavior of voters. In a…
Many democratic societies use district-based elections, where the region under consideration is geographically divided into districts and a representative is chosen for each district based on the preferences of the electors who reside…
This article analyses three methods of remote voting in an uncontrolled environment: postal voting, internet voting and hybrid voting. It breaks down the voting process into different stages and compares their vulnerabilities considering…
Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…
This paper builds upon the work of Dougherty and Heckelman (2020) by determining the frequency that 13 voting systems violate Arrow's social choice criteria with up to six alternatives. These results determine which of the 13 voting…
We discuss voting scenarios in which the set of voters (agents) and the set of alternatives are the same; that is, voters select a single representative from among themselves. Such a scenario happens, for instance, when a committee selects…
In an election campaign, candidates must decide how to optimally allocate their efforts/resources optimally among the regions of a country. As a result, the outcome of the election will depend on the players' strategies and the voters'…
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…
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…
As the world's democratic institutions are challenged by dissatisfied citizens, political scientists and also computer scientists have proposed and analyzed various (innovative) methods to select representative bodies, a crucial task in…
Democratic societies are built around the principle of free and fair elections, that each citizen's vote should count equal. National elections can be regarded as large-scale social experiments, where people are grouped into usually large…
Viscous democracy is a generalization of liquid democracy, a social choice framework in which voters may transitively delegate their votes. In viscous democracy, a "viscosity" factor decreases the weight of a delegation the further it…
Analyses of voting algorithms often overlook informational externalities shaping individual votes. For example, pre-polling information often skews voters towards candidates who may not be their top choice, but who they believe would be a…
Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so (Galileo Galilei). According to the above sentence we do not ask why we need to measure democracy but if it is possible to measure something which is not unequivocally defined.…
The major finding, of this article, is an ensemble method, but more exactly, a novel, better ranked voting system (and other variations of it), that aims to solve the problem of finding the best candidate to represent the voters. We have…
This study seeks to identify and quantify biases in simulating political samples with Large Language Models, specifically focusing on vote choice and public opinion. Using the GPT-3.5-Turbo model, we leverage data from the American National…
This article shows how fair voting methods can be a catalyst for change in the way we make collective decisions, and how such change can promote long-awaited upgrades of democracy. Based on real-world evidence from democratic innovations in…