Related papers: Instant Runoff Voting and the Reinforcement Parado…
We evaluate the tendency for different voting methods to promote political compromise and reduce tensions in a society by using computer simulations to determine which voters candidates are incentivized to appeal to. We find that Instant…
The voting systems known as Alternative Vote (AV) and Single Transferable Vote (STV) are extensively used for elections in Australia, possibly more than in any other jurisdiction. Often proposed as superior alternatives to Plurality and…
The standard voting methods in the United States, plurality and ranked choice (or instant runoff) voting, are susceptible to significant voting failures. These flaws include Condorcet and majority failures as well as monotonicity and…
The communication complexity of a voting rule is the worst-case number of bits that n voters must transmit to a central authority under the most efficient elicitation protocol in an election with m candidates. We study the communication…
In ranked-choice elections voters cast preference ballots which provide a voter's ranking of the candidates. The method of ranked-choice voting (RCV) chooses a winner by using voter preferences to simulate a series of runoff elections. Some…
We study a modification of the so-called Parrondo's paradox where a large number of individuals choose the game they want to play by voting. We show that it can be better for the players to vote randomly than to vote according to their own…
Ranked-choice voting anomalies such as monotonicity paradoxes have been extensively studied through creating hypothetical examples and generating elections under various models of voter behavior. However, very few real-world examples of…
From the perspective of social choice theory, ranked-choice voting (RCV) is known to have many flaws. RCV can fail to elect a Condorcet winner and is susceptible to monotonicity paradoxes and the spoiler effect, for example. We use a…
Fairness in multiwinner elections is studied in varying contexts. For instance, diversity of candidates and representation of voters are both separately termed as being fair. A common denominator to ensure fairness across all such contexts…
The paper deals with the problem of finding the best alternatives on the basis of pairwise comparisons when these comparisons need not be transitive. In this setting, we study a reinforcement urn model. We prove convergence to the optimal…
We investigate the problem of computing the probability of winning in an election where voter attendance is uncertain. More precisely, we study the setting where, in addition to a total ordering of the candidates, each voter is associated…
We describe the vote package in R, which implements the plurality (or first-past-the-post), two-round runoff, score, approval and single transferable vote (STV) electoral systems, as well as methods for selecting the Condorcet winner and…
We consider voting on multiple independent binary issues. In addition, a weighting vector for each voter defines how important they consider each issue. The most natural way to aggregate the votes into a single unified proposal is…
Do runoff elections, using the same voting rule as the initial election but just on the winning candidates, increase or decrease the complexity of manipulation? Does allowing revoting in the runoff increase or decrease the complexity…
Parrondo's paradox arises in sequences of games in which a winning expectation may be obtained by playing the games in a random order, even though each game in the sequence may be lost when played individually. We present a suitable version…
We study the effect of strategic behavior in iterative voting for multiple issues under uncertainty. We introduce a model synthesizing simultaneous multi-issue voting with Meir, Lev, and Rosenschein (2014)'s local dominance theory and…
The classic Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem says that every strategy-proof voting rule with at least three possible candidates must be dictatorial. In \cite{McL11}, McLennan showed that a similar impossibility result holds even if we consider…
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) adoption is expanding across U.S. elections, but faces persistent criticism for complexity, strategic manipulation, and ballot exhaustion. We empirically test these concerns on real election data, across three…
An election audit is risk-limiting if the audit limits (to a pre-specified threshold) the chance that an erroneous electoral outcome will be certified. Extant methods for auditing instant-runoff voting (IRV) elections are either not…
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…