Related papers: Misrepresentation in District-Based Elections
This paper presents a novel mechanism to endogenously determine the fair division of a state into electoral districts in a two-party setting. No geometric constraints are imposed on voter distributions or district shapes; instead, it is…
The Constitutionally mandated task of assigning Congressional seats to the various U.S. States proportional to their represented populations ("according to their numbers") has engendered much contention, but rather less consensus. Using the…
The recent wave of attention to partisan gerrymandering has come with a push to refine or replace the laws that govern political redistricting around the country. A common element in several states' reform efforts has been the inclusion of…
Computing and storing probabilities is a hard problem as soon as one has to deal with complex distributions over multiple random variables. The problem of efficient representation of probability distributions is central in term of…
In representative democracy, a redistricting map is chosen to partition an electorate into districts which each elects a representative. A valid redistricting map must satisfy a collection of constraints such as being compact, contiguous,…
The study of proportionality in multiwinner voting with approval ballots has received much attention in recent years. Typically, proportionality is captured by variants of the Justified Representation axiom, which say that cohesive groups…
How much influence can a coordinated coalition exert in a multiwinner Top-$k$ election under a positional scoring rule? We study the maximum displacement problem: with coalition size $m$, how many of the current top-$k$ winners can be…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic paradigm whereby voters decide on a set of projects to fund with a limited budget. We consider PB in a setting where voters report ordinal preferences over projects and have (possibly) asymmetric…
This paper is to obtain a simple dividing-diagram of the congressional districts, where the only limit is that each district should contain the same population if possibly. In order to solve this problem, we introduce three different…
We compare and contrast fourteen measures that have been proposed for the purpose of quantifying partisan gerrymandering. We consider measures that, rather than examining the shapes of districts, utilize only the partisan vote distribution…
Many democratic societies use district-based elections, where the region under consideration is geographically divided into districts and a representative is chosen for each district based on the preferences of the electors who reside…
Clustering is a well-studied unsupervised learning task that aims to partition data points into a number of clusters. In many applications, these clusters correspond to real-world constructs (e.g., electoral districts, playlists, TV…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
The single transferable vote (STV) is a system of preferential proportional voting employed in multi-seat elections. Each ballot cast by a voter is a (potentially partial) ranking over a set of candidates. The margin of victory, or simply…
We consider elections where the voters come one at a time, in a streaming fashion, and devise space-efficient algorithms which identify an approximate winning committee with respect to common multiwinner proportional representation voting…
In this paper we extend the principle of proportional representation to rankings. We consider the setting where alternatives need to be ranked based on approval preferences. In this setting, proportional representation requires that…
In this paper we study online Reinforcement Learning (RL) in partially observable dynamical systems. We focus on the Predictive State Representations (PSRs) model, which is an expressive model that captures other well-known models such as…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process for allocating funds to projects based on the votes of members of the community. Different rules have been used to aggregate participants' votes. Past research has studied the trade-off…
In rank aggregation, the task is to aggregate multiple weighted input rankings into a single output ranking. While numerous methods, so-called social welfare functions (SWFs), have been suggested for this problem, all of the classical SWFs…
Justified representation (JR) and extended justified representation (EJR) are well-established proportionality axioms in approval-based multiwinner voting. Both axioms are always satisfiable, but they rely on a fixed quota (typically Hare…