Related papers: Voter Turnouts Govern Key Electoral Statistics
In multiwinner approval elections with many candidates, voters may struggle to determine their preferences over the entire slate of candidates. It is therefore of interest to explore which (if any) fairness guarantees can be provided under…
The two most common types of electoral systems (ES) used in electing national legislatures are proportional representation and plurality voting. When they are evaluated, most often the arguments come from social choice theory and political…
We investigate the distribution of partisanship in a cross-section of ten diverse States to elucidate how votes translate into seats won and other metrics. Markov chain simulations taking into account partisanship distribution agree…
In majority voting dynamics, a group of $n$ agents in a social network are asked for their preferred candidate in a future election between two possible choices. At each time step, a new poll is taken, and each agent adjusts their vote…
Several election districts in the US have recently moved to ranked-choice voting (RCV) to decide the results of local elections. RCV allows voters to rank their choices, and the results are computed in rounds, eliminating one candidate at a…
Opinion diffusion is a crucial phenomenon in social networks, often underlying the way in which a collective of agents develops a consensus on relevant decisions. The voter model is a well-known theoretical model to study opinion spreading…
In this paper we study the impact of news media and public surveys on the electoral campaigns for political competitions. We present an agent-based model that addresses the effective influence of surveys in orienting the opinions of voters…
Issue salience is a major determinant in voters' decisions. Candidates and political parties campaign to shift salience to their advantage - a process termed priming. We study the dynamics, strategies and equilibria of campaign spending for…
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…
Polls posted on social media have emerged in recent years as an important tool for estimating public opinion, e.g., to gauge public support for business decisions and political candidates in national elections. Here, we examine nearly two…
We develop a theory of distributive competition under redistricting that explains both electoral outcomes and the equilibrium allocation of policy benefits by endogenizing voter pivotality. In a multi-district model with primaries, general…
In this paper, we extend the voter model (VM) and the threshold voter model (TVM) to include external influences modelled as a jump process. We study the newly-formulated models both analytically and computationally, employing diffusion…
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…
Motivated by recent successes in model-based pre-election polling, we propose a kinetic model for opinion formation which includes voter demographics and socio-economic factors like age, sex, ethnicity, education level, income and other…
We consider the notions of agreement, diversity, and polarization in ordinal elections (that is, in elections where voters rank the candidates). While (computational) social choice offers good measures of agreement between the voters, such…
The voter model is a toy model of consensus formation based on nearest-neighbor interactions. A voter sits at each vertex in a hypercubic lattice (of dimension $d$) and is in one of two possible opinion states. The opinion state of each…
U.S. presidential elections are decided by the Electoral College, established in 1789, and designed to mitigate potential risks arising from the collusion of large groups of citizens. A statewide winner-take-all popular voting system for…
We study the voting game where agents' preferences are endogenously decided by the information they receive, and they can collaborate in a group. We show that strategic voting behaviors have a positive impact on leading to the ``correct''…
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…
The adoption of crowdsourced election monitoring as a complementary alternative to traditional election monitoring is on the rise. Yet, its reliance on digital response volunteers to manually process incoming election reports poses a…