Related papers: Misrepresentation in District-Based Elections
The study of fairness in multiwinner elections focuses on settings where candidates have attributes. However, voters may also be divided into predefined populations under one or more attributes (e.g., "California" and "Illinois" populations…
We consider elections where both voters and candidates can be associated with points in a metric space and voters prefer candidates that are closer to those that are farther away. It is often assumed that the optimal candidate is the one…
How to elect the representatives in legislative bodies is a question that every modern democracy has to answer. This design task has to consider various elements so as to fulfill the citizens' expectations and contribute to the maintenance…
In real-world Bayesian inference applications, prior assumptions regarding the parameters of interest may be unrepresentative of their actual values for a given dataset. In particular, if the likelihood is concentrated far out in the wings…
The apportionment problem constitutes a fundamental problem in democratic societies: How to distribute a fixed number of seats among a set of states in proportion to the states' populations? This--seemingly simple--task has led to a rich…
The success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the ability to learn robust representations from the observations of the environment. In most cases, the representations learned purely by the reinforcement learning loss can…
Policies of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) determine the next action to execute from the current state and, possibly, the history (the past states). When the number of states is large, succinct representations are often used to compactly…
We discuss difficulties of evaluating partisan gerrymandering in the congressional districts in Utah and the failure of many common metrics in Utah. We explain why the Republican vote share in the least-Republican district (LRVS) is a good…
We consider the distributed single-winner metric voting problem on a line, where agents and alternative are represented by points on the line of real numbers, the agents are partitioned into disjoint districts, and the goal is to choose a…
Extracting a small subset of representative tuples from a large database is an important task in multi-criteria decision making. The regret-minimizing set (RMS) problem is recently proposed for representative discovery from databases.…
Apportionment is the problem of distributing $h$ indivisible seats across states in proportion to the states' populations. In the context of the US House of Representatives, this problem has a rich history and is a prime example of…
Sortition is based on the idea of choosing randomly selected representatives for decision making. The main properties that make sortition particularly appealing are fairness -- all the citizens can be selected with the same probability --…
Few-shot image classification aims at recognizing unseen categories with a small number of labeled training data. Recent metric-based frameworks tend to represent a support class by a fixed prototype (e.g., the mean of the support category)…
We explore the Declination, a new metric intended to detect partisan gerrymandering. We consider instances in which each district has equal turnout, the maximum turnout to minimum turnout is bounded, and turnout is unrestricted. For each of…
Liquid democracy allows members of an electorate to either directly vote over alternatives, or delegate their voting rights to someone they trust. Most of the liquid democracy literature and implementations allow each voter to nominate only…
When selecting multiple candidates based on approval preferences of agents, the proportional representation of agents' opinions is an important and well-studied desideratum. Existing criteria for evaluating the representativeness of…
The computational study of elections generally assumes that the preferences of the electorate come in as a list of votes. Depending on the context, it may be much more natural to represent the list succinctly, as the distinct votes of the…
Representativeness is a foundational yet slippery concept. Though familiar at first blush, it lacks a single precise meaning. Instead, meanings range from typical or characteristic, to a proportionate match between sample and population, to…
The metric distortion framework posits that n voters and m candidates are jointly embedded in a metric space such that voters rank candidates that are closer to them higher. A voting rule's purpose is to pick a candidate with minimum total…
We study the problem of a partisan gerrymanderer who assigns voters to equipopulous districts so as to maximize his party's expected seat share. The designer faces both aggregate uncertainty (how many votes his party will receive) and…