Related papers: Voter Turnouts Govern Key Electoral Statistics
A national voting population, when segmented into groups like, for example, different states, can yield a counter-intuitive scenario where the winner may not necessarily get the most number of total votes. A recent example is the 2016…
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…
Opinion dynamics is crucial for unraveling the complexities of human interaction in the information age. How to speed up consensus without disturbing the fate of the system is key for opinion dynamics. We propose a voter model on adaptive…
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…
We investigate a variation of the classical voter model in which the set of influencing agents depends on an individual's current opinion. The initial population consists of a random sample of equally sized sub-populations for each state,…
We build simple models for the distribution of voting patterns in a group, using the Supreme Court of the United States as an example. The least structured, or maximum entropy, model that is consistent with the observed pairwise…
In this paper, a new method of detection of election fraud is proposed. This method is based on the calculation of the ratio of two standard normal random variables; estimation of parameters of obtained sample and comparison of these…
A well-studied randomized election algorithm proceeds as follows: In each round the remaining candidates each toss a coin and leave the competition if they obtain heads. Of interest is the number of rounds required and the number of…
We introduce the confident voter model, in which each voter can be in one of two opinions and can additionally have two levels of commitment to an opinion --- confident and unsure. Upon interacting with an agent of a different opinion, a…
Large-scale datasets are increasingly being used to inform decision making. While this effort aims to ground policy in real-world evidence, challenges have arisen as selection bias and other forms of distribution shifts often plague…
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…
Voting algorithms have been widely used as consensus protocols in the realization of fault-tolerant systems. These algorithms are best suited for distributed systems of nodes with low computational power or heterogeneous networks, where…
Complex dynamical systems driven by the unravelling of information can be modelled effectively by treating the underlying flow of information as the model input. Complicated dynamical behaviour of the system is then derived as an output.…
Voter fraud in the United States is rare and the vote-counting system is robust against tampering, but there remains widespread distrust in the security of election infrastructure among the public. We consider statistical means of detecting…
In many proportional parliamentary elections, electoral thresholds (typically 3-5%) are used to promote stability and governability by preventing the election of parties with very small representation. However, these thresholds often result…
Social media platforms are thriving nowadays, so a huge volume of data is produced. As it includes brief and clear statements, millions of people post their thoughts on microblogging sites every day. This paper represents and analyze the…
Voter demographics and socio-economic factors like age, sex, ethnicity, education level, income, and other measurable factors like behaviour in previous elections or referenda are of key importance in modelling opinion formation dynamics.…
Our main contribution is the introduction of the map of elections framework. A map of elections consists of three main elements: (1) a dataset of elections (i.e., collections of ordinal votes over given sets of candidates), (2) a way of…
We investigate coarsening and persistence in the voter model by introducing the quantity $P_n(t)$, defined as the fraction of voters who changed their opinion n times up to time t. We show that $P_n(t)$ exhibits scaling behavior that…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…