Related papers: Voter Turnouts Govern Key Electoral Statistics

Two of the main factors shaping an individual's opinion are social coordination and personal preferences, or personal biases. To understand the role of those and that of the topology of the network of interactions, we study an extension of…

We present novel methods for predicting the outcome of large elections. Our first algorithm uses a diffusion process to model the time uncertainty inherent in polls taken with substantial calendar time left to the election. Our second model…

The paper considers the problem of finding the number of dominant voters in two-level voting procedures. At the first stage, voting is conducted among local groups of voters, and at the second stage, the results are aggregated to form a…

This paper formalizes the lattice structure of the ballot voters cast in a ranked-choice election and the preferences that this structure induces. These preferences are shown to be counter to previous assumptions about the preferences of…

We propose a stochastic model of opinion exchange in networks. A finite set of agents is organized in a fixed network structure. There is a binary state of the world and each agent receives a private signal on the state. We model beliefs as…

A key promise of democratic voting is that, by accounting for all constituents' preferences, it produces decisions that benefit the constituency overall. It is alarming, then, that all deterministic voting rules have unbounded distortion:…

We study a stochastic model for the diffusion of competing opinions in a population composed of three types of agents: trend-followers, opposers, and indifferent individuals. The decision dynamics are driven by reinforcement mechanisms,…

We model voting behaviour in the multi-group setting of a two-tier voting system using sequences of de Finetti measures. Our model is defined by using the de Finetti representation of a probability measure (i.e. as a mixture of…

We propose a framework for strategic voting when a voter may lack knowledge about the preferences of other voters, or about other voters' knowledge about her own preference. In this setting we define notions of manipulation, equilibrium,…

The major finding, of this article, is an ensemble method, but more exactly, a novel, better ranked voting system (and other variations of it), that aims to solve the problem of finding the best candidate to represent the voters. We have…

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…

We consider the approval-based model of elections, and undertake a computational study of voting rules which select committees whose size is not predetermined. While voting rules that output committees with a predetermined number of winning…

Coalitional manipulation in voting is considered to be any scenario in which a group of voters decide to misrepresent their vote in order to secure an outcome they all prefer to the first outcome of the election when they vote honestly. The…

Large-scale data from social media have a significant potential to describe complex phenomena in real world and to anticipate collective behaviors such as information spreading and social trends. One specific case of study is represented by…

We show how to use automated computation of election margins to assess the number of votes that would need to change in order to alter a parliamentary outcome for single-member preferential electorates. In the context of increasing…

Consider an election where N seats are distributed among parties with proportions p_1,...,p_m of the votes. We study, for the common divisor and quota methods, the asymptotic distribution, and in particular the mean, of the seat excess of a…

This paper presents a class of new algorithms for distributed statistical estimation that exploit divide-and-conquer approach. We show that one of the key benefits of the divide-and-conquer strategy is robustness, an important…

Every representative democracy must specify a mechanism under which voters choose their representatives. The most common mechanism in the United States -- Winner takes all single-member districts -- both enables substantial partisan…

Stochastic dominance is a crucial tool for the analysis of choice under risk. It is typically analyzed as a property of two gambles that are taken in isolation. We study how additional independent sources of risk (e.g. uninsurable labor…

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…