Related papers: Discovering Consistent Subelections
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…
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 view voting rules as classifiers that assign a winner (a class) to a profile of voters' preferences (an instance). We propose to apply techniques from formal explainability, most notably abductive and contrastive explanations, to…
Actual individual preferences are neither complete (=total) nor antisymmetric in general, so that at least every quasi-order must be an admissible input to a satisfactory choice rule. It is argued that the traditional notion of…
A method is given for quantitatively rating the social acceptance of different options which are the matter of a complete preferential vote. Completeness means that every voter expresses a comparison (a preference or a tie) about each pair…
Winner selection by majority, in an election between two candidates, is the only rule compatible with democratic principles. Instead, when the candidates are three or more and the voters rank candidates in order of preference, there are no…
This paper considers elections in which voters choose one candidate each, independently according to known probability distributions. A candidate receiving a strict majority (absolute or relative, depending on the version) wins. After the…
In voting contexts, some new candidates may show up in the course of the process. In this case, we may want to determine which of the initial candidates are possible winners, given that a fixed number $k$ of new candidates will be added. We…
Consensus and leader election are fundamental problems in distributed systems. Consensus is the problem in which all processes in a distributed computation must agree on some value. Average consensus is a popular form of consensus, where…
The computational study of elections generally assumes that the preferences of the electorate come in as a list of votes. Depending on the context, it may be much more natural to represent the list succinctly, as the distinct votes of the…
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,…
We introduce and study isomorphic distances between ordinal elections (with the same numbers of candidates and voters). The main feature of these distances is that they are invariant to renaming the candidates and voters, and two elections…
Referring to a standard context of voting theory, and to the classic notion of voting situation, here we show that it is possible to observe any arbitrary set of elections' outcomes, no matter how paradoxical it may appear. On this purpose…
This work analyses surprising elections, and attempts to quantify the notion of surprise in elections. A voter is surprised if their estimate of the winner (assumed to be based on a combination of the preferences of their social connections…
Many classical social choice correspondences are resolute only in the case of two alternatives and an odd number of individuals. Thus, in most cases, they admit several resolute refinements, each of them naturally interpreted as a…
We introduce the model of line-up elections which captures parallel or sequential single-winner elections with a shared candidate pool. The goal of a line-up election is to find a high-quality assignment of a set of candidates to a set of…
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…
We describe a very simple method for `consistent sampling' that allows for sampling with replacement. The method extends previous approaches to consistent sampling, which assign a pseudorandom real number to each element, and sample those…
We propose new methods of electoral statistics. With their help, we study transcripts of vote counting in municipal elections. We construct and apply effective statistical tests to detect the ballot stuffing at the level of individual…