Related papers: An Evaluation of Borda Count Variations Using Rank…
We present a method and software for ballot-polling risk-limiting audits (RLAs) based on Bernoulli sampling: ballots are included in the sample with probability $p$, independently. Bernoulli sampling has several advantages: (1) it does not…
A committee's decisions on more than two alternatives much depend on the adopted voting method, and so does the distribution of power among the committee members. We investigate how different aggregation methods such as plurality runoff,…
We study positional voting rules when candidates and voters are embedded in a common metric space, and cardinal preferences are naturally given by distances in the metric space. In a positional voting rule, each candidate receives a score…
In collective decision making, where a voting rule is used to take a collective decision among a group of agents, manipulation by one or more agents is usually considered negative behavior to be avoided, or at least to be made…
The main risk-limiting ballot polling audit in use today, BRAVO, is designed for use when single ballots are drawn at random and a decision regarding whether to stop the audit or draw another ballot is taken after each ballot draw…
In the context of computational social choice, we study voting methods that assign a set of winners to each profile of voter preferences. A voting method satisfies the property of positive involvement (PI) if for any election in which a…
To make a joint decision, agents (or voters) are often required to provide their preferences as linear orders. To determine a winner, the given linear orders can be aggregated according to a voting protocol. However, in realistic settings,…
In this paper we develop a novel approach to relaxing Arrow's axioms for voting rules, addressing a long-standing critique in social choice theory. Classical axioms (often styled as fairness axioms or fairness criteria) are assessed in a…
We propose a new single-winner election method ("Schulze method") and prove that it satisfies many academic criteria (e.g. monotonicity, reversal symmetry, resolvability, independence of clones, Condorcet criterion, k-consistency,…
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…
U.S. elections rely heavily on computers such as voter registration databases, electronic pollbooks, voting machines, scanners, tabulators, and results reporting websites. These introduce digital threats to election outcomes. Risk-limiting…
We study the classical Election problem in anonymous net- works, where solutions can rely on the use of random bits, which may be either shared or unshared among nodes. We provide a complete char- acterization of the conditions under which…
We study the voting problem with two alternatives where voters' preferences depend on a not-directly-observable state variable. While equilibria in the one-round voting mechanisms lead to a good decision, they are usually hard to compute…
A simple and quick general test to screen for numerical anomalies is presented. It can be applied, for example, to electoral processes, both electronic and manual. It uses vote counts in officially published voting units, which are…
Condorcet's jury theorem states that the correct outcome is reached in direct majority voting systems with sufficiently large electorates as long as each voter's independent probability of voting for that outcome is greater than 0.5. Yet,…
In boosting, we aim to leverage multiple weak learners to produce a strong learner. At the center of this paradigm lies the concept of building the strong learner as a voting classifier, which outputs a weighted majority vote of the weak…
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…
We analyze the performance of the Borda counting algorithm in a non-parametric model. The algorithm needs to utilize probabilistic rankings of the items within $m$-sized subsets to accurately determine which items are the overall top-$k$…
We consider the problem of learning over non-stationary ranking streams. The rankings can be interpreted as the preferences of a population and the non-stationarity means that the distribution of preferences changes over time. Our goal is…
We consider the problem of predicting winners in elections, for the case where we are given complete knowledge about all possible candidates, all possible voters (together with their preferences), but where it is uncertain either which…