Related papers: Vulnerability of democratic electoral systems

With a folk understanding that political polarization refers to socio-political divisions within a society, many have proclaimed that we are more divided than ever. In this account, polarization has been blamed for populism, the erosion of…

Maximum likelihood estimation furnishes powerful insights into voting theory, and the design of voting rules. However the MLE can usually be badly corrupted by a single outlying sample. This means that a single voter or a group of colluding…

How can voters induce politicians to put forth more proximate (in terms of preference) as well as credible platforms (in terms of promise fulfillment) under repeated elections? Building on the work of Aragones et al. (2007), I study how…

Decision procedures aggregating the preferences of multiple agents can produce cycles and hence outcomes which have been described heuristically as `chaotic'. We make this description precise by constructing an explicit dynamical system…

Counting votes is complex and error-prone. Several statistical methods have been developed to assess election accuracy by manually inspecting randomly selected physical ballots. Two 'principled' methods are risk-limiting audits (RLAs) and…

Metric distortion in social choice is a framework for evaluating how well voting rules minimize social cost when both voters and candidates exist in a shared metric space, with a voter's cost defined by their distance to a candidate. Voters…

Voting theory has become increasingly integrated with computational social choice and multiagent systems. Computational complexity has been extensively used as a shield against manipulation of voting systems, however for several voting…

Electoral control models ways of changing the outcome of an election via such actions as adding/deleting/partitioning either candidates or voters. To protect elections from such control attempts, computational complexity has been…

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…

This thesis deals with General Probabilistic Theories (GPTs) and Entanglement Structures (ESs). An ES is a possible structure of a quantum composite system in GPTs, which is not uniquely determined as the Standard Entanglement Structure…

Several elections run in the last years have been characterized by attempts to manipulate the result of the election through the diffusion of fake or malicious news over social networks. This problem has been recognized as a critical issue…

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…

The mathematical study of voting, social choice theory, has traditionally only been applicable to choices among a few predetermined alternatives, but not to open-ended decisions such as collectively selecting a textual statement. We…

With historic misses in the 2016 and 2020 US Presidential elections, interest in measuring polling errors has increased. The most common method for measuring directional errors and non-sampling excess variability during a postmortem for an…

Reliability analysis is a sub-field of uncertainty quantification that assesses the probability of a system performing as intended under various uncertainties. Traditionally, this analysis relies on deterministic models, where experiments…

The voting systems known as Alternative Vote (AV) and Single Transferable Vote (STV) are extensively used for elections in Australia, possibly more than in any other jurisdiction. Often proposed as superior alternatives to Plurality and…

Lu and Boutilier proposed a novel approach based on "minimax regret" to use classical score based voting rules in the setting where preferences can be any partial (instead of complete) orders over the set of alternatives. We show here that…

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…

In an election, we are given a set of voters, each having a preference list over a set of candidates, that are distributed on a social network. We consider a scenario where voters may change their preference lists as a consequence of the…

Epistemic social choice aims at unveiling a hidden ground truth given votes, which are interpreted as noisy signals about it. We consider here a simple setting where votes consist of approval ballots: each voter approves a set of…