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We study the health consequences of redistributing political power through the 1975 extension of the Voting Rights Act, which eliminated barriers to voting for previously disenfranchised nonwhite populations. The intervention led to broad…
Several measures of partisan bias are reviewed for single member districts with two dominant parties. These include variants of the simple bias that considers only deviation of seats from 50% at statewide 50% vote. Also included are…
The following is a write up of the progress of modeling data from the K12 organization \cite{Riedman_2023}. Data was characterized and investigated for statistically significant factors. The incident data was spilt into three sets: the…
It has been suggested that online search and retrieval contributes to the intellectual isolation of users within their preexisting ideologies, where people's prior views are strengthened and alternative viewpoints are infrequently…
Predicting how Congressional legislators will vote is important for understanding their past and future behavior. However, previous work on roll-call prediction has been limited to single session settings, thus did not consider…
Forecasting elections -- a challenging, high-stakes problem -- is the subject of much uncertainty, subjectivity, and media scrutiny. To shed light on this process, we develop a method for forecasting elections from the perspective of…
Using the recently introduced declination function, we estimate the net number of seats won in the US House of Representatives due to asymmetries in vote distributions. Such asymmetries can arise from combinations of partisan gerrymandering…
Democracy often fails to meet its ideals, and these failures may be made worse by electoral institutions. Unwanted outcomes include polarized institutions, unresponsive representatives, and the ability of a faction of voters to gain power…
Despite many examples to the contrary, most models of elections assume that rules determining the winner will be followed. We present a model where elections are solely a public signal of the incumbent popularity, and citizens can protests…
Amidst the rapid normalization of generative artificial intelligence (GAI), intelligent systems have come to dominate political discourse across information media. However, internalized political biases stemming from training data skews,…
By the end of May 2020, all states in the US have eased their COVID-19 mitigation measures. Different states adopted markedly different policies and timing for reopening. An important question remains in how the relaxation of mitigation…
Climate policy and legislation has a significant influence on both domestic and global responses to the pressing environmental challenges of our time. The effectiveness of such climate legislation is closely tied to the complex dynamics…
We propose a simple mathematical model to describe the evolution of violent crimes. For such purpose, we built a model based on ordinary differential equations that take into account the number of violent crimes and the number of legal and…
In the United States electoral system, a candidate is elected indirectly by winning a majority of electoral votes cast by individual states, the election usually being decided by the votes cast by a small number of "swing states" where the…
Each year, the United States Congress considers thousands of legislative proposals to select bills to present to the US President to sign into law. Naturally, the decision processes of members of Congress are subject to peer influence. In…
Understanding the nature of strategic voting is the holy grail of social choice theory, where game-theory, social science and recently computational approaches are all applied in order to model the incentives and behavior of voters. In a…
Since Downs proposed that the act of voting is irrational in 1957, myriad models have been proposed to explain voting and account for observed turnout patterns. We propose a model in which partisans consider both the instrumental and…
This paper presents a survey of local US policymakers' views on the future impact and regulation of AI. Our survey provides insight into US policymakers' expectations regarding the effects of AI on local communities and the nation, as well…
People who are involved with political campaigns face increased digital security threats from well-funded, sophisticated attackers, especially nation-states. Improving political campaign security is a vital part of protecting democracy. To…
The challenge of understanding the collective behaviors of social systems can benefit from methods and concepts from physics [1-6], not because humans are similar to electrons, but because certain large-scale behaviors can be understood…