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Voting advice applications (VAAs) help millions of voters understand which political parties or candidates best align with their views. This paper explores the potential risks these applications pose to the democratic process when targeted…
Like many other voting systems, Majority Judgement suffers from the weaknesses of the underlying mathematical model: Elections as problem of choice or ranking. We show how the model can be enhanced to take into account the complete process…
Single Transferable Vote (STV) is a voting method used to elect multiple candidates in ranked-choice elections. One weakness of STV is that it fails multiple fairness criteria related to monotonicity and no show paradoxes. We analyze 1,079…
In this paper, we consider mixtures of two Mallows models for top-$k$ rankings, both with the same location parameter but with different scale parameters, i.e., a mixture of concentric Mallows models. This situation arises when we have a…
We introduce a bottleneck method for learning data representations based on information deficiency, rather than the more traditional information sufficiency. A variational upper bound allows us to implement this method efficiently. The…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
There has been much recent work on multiwinner voting systems. However, sometimes a committee is highly structured, and if we want to vote for such a committee, our voting method should be more structured as well. We consider committees…
Much research in electoral control -- one of the most studied form of electoral attacks, in which an entity running an election alters the structure of that election to yield a preferred outcome -- has focused on giving decision complexity…
Finding outlying elements in probability distributions can be a hard problem. Taking a real example from Voting Rights Act enforcement, we consider the problem of maximizing the number of simultaneous majority-minority districts in a…
Visual Place Recognition has recently seen a surge of endeavours utilizing different ensemble approaches to improve VPR performance. Ideas like multi-process fusion or switching involve combining different VPR techniques together, utilizing…
Previous studies have shown that Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) is highly resistant to coalitional manipulation (CM), though the theoretical reasons for this remain unclear. To address this gap, we analyze the susceptibility to CM of three…
Multiwinner voting rules can be used to select a fixed-size committee from a larger set of candidates. We consider approval-based committee rules, which allow voters to approve or disapprove candidates. In this setting, several voting rules…
Since the 1970s there has been a large number of countries that combine formal democratic institutions with authoritarian practices. Although in such countries the ruling elites may receive considerable voter support they often employ…
In an election where $n$ voters rank $m$ candidates, a Condorcet winning set is a committee of $k$ candidates such that for any outside candidate, a majority of voters prefer some committee member. Condorcet's paradox shows that some…
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…
There are many sources of error in counting votes: the apparent winner might not be the rightful winner. Hand tallies of the votes in a random sample of precincts can be used to test the hypothesis that a full manual recount would find a…
We provide elementary proofs of several results concerning the possible outcomes arising from a fixed profile within the class of positional voting systems. Our arguments enable a simple and explicit construction of paradoxical profiles,…
The rebellious voter model, introduced by Sturm and Swart (2008), is a variation of the standard, one-dimensional voter model, in which types that are locally in the minority have an advantage. It is related, both through duality and…
We present an approximate sampling framework and discuss how risk-limiting audits can compensate for these approximations, while maintaining their "risk-limiting" properties. Our framework is general and can compensate for counting mistakes…
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) can provide routine, affirmative evidence that reported election outcomes are correct by checking a random sample of cast ballots. An efficient RLA requires checking relatively few ballots. Here we construct…