Related papers: The Negative Participation Paradox in Three-Candid…
We analyze the susceptibility of instant runoff voting (IRV) to a lesser-studied paradox known as a \emph{reinforcement paradox}, which occurs when candidate $X$ wins under IRV in two distinct elections but $X$ loses in the combined…
I derive the probability that a vote cast in an Instant Runoff Voting election will change the election winner. I phrase that probability in terms of the candidates' expected vote totals, and then I estimate its magnitude for different…
We analyze a type of voting paradox which we term an involvement paradox, in which a candidate who loses an election could be made into a winner if more of the candidate's non-supporters participated in the election, or a winner could be…
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…
The standard voting methods in the United States, plurality and ranked choice (or instant runoff) voting, are susceptible to significant voting failures. These flaws include Condorcet and majority failures as well as monotonicity and…
We analyze how frequently instant runoff voting (IRV) selects the weakest (or least popular) candidate in three-candidate elections. We consider four definitions of ``weakest candidate'': the Borda loser, the Bucklin loser, the candidate…
Ranked-choice voting anomalies such as monotonicity paradoxes have been extensively studied through creating hypothetical examples and generating elections under various models of voter behavior. However, very few real-world examples of…
Instant runoff voting (IRV) has recently gained popularity as an alternative to plurality voting for political elections, with advocates claiming a range of advantages, including that it produces more moderate winners than plurality and…
We analyse strategic, complete information, sequential voting with ordinal preferences over the alternatives. We consider several voting mechanisms: plurality voting and approval voting with deterministic or uniform tie-breaking rules. We…
How can we probabilistically predict the winner in a ranked-choice election without all ballots being counted? In this study, we introduce a novel algorithm designed to predict outcomes in Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) elections. The…
Instant runoff voting (IRV) is an increasingly-popular alternative to traditional plurality voting in which voters submit rankings over the candidates rather than single votes. In practice, elections using IRV often restrict the ballot…
Perpetual voting addresses fairness in sequential collective decision-making by evaluating representational equity over time. However, existing perpetual voting rules rely on full participation and complete approval information, assumptions…
This article extends the analysis of Atkinson, Foley, and Ganz in "Beyond the Spoiler Effect: Can Ranked-Choice Voting Solve the Problem of Political Polarization?". Their work uses a one-dimensional spatial model based on survey data from…
The two envelopes paradox is discussed. By calculating the conditional probability, we arrive at a conditional expectations which differs from existing results.
The probability of a given candidate winning a future election is worked out in closed form as a function of (i) the current support rates for each candidate, (ii) the relative positioning of the candidates within the political spectrum,…
The classic Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem says that every strategy-proof voting rule with at least three possible candidates must be dictatorial. In \cite{McL11}, McLennan showed that a similar impossibility result holds even if we consider…
We study the phenomenon of intransitivity in models of dice and voting. First, we follow a recent thread of research for $n$-sided dice with pairwise ordering induced by the probability, relative to $1/2$, that a throw from one die is…
We study a modification of the so-called Parrondo's paradox where a large number of individuals choose the game they want to play by voting. We show that it can be better for the players to vote randomly than to vote according to their own…
A large amount of literature in social choice theory deals with quantifying the probability of certain election outcomes. One way of computing the probability of a specific voting situation under the Impartial Anonymous Culture assumption…
Errors are inevitable in the implementation of any complex process. Here we examine the effect of random errors on Single Transferable Vote (STV) elections, a common approach to deciding multi-seat elections. It is usually expected that…