Related papers: Simpler Than You Think: The Practical Dynamics of …
Elections where electors rank the candidates (or a subset of the candidates) in order of preference allow the collection of more information about the electors' intent. The most widely used election of this type is Instant-Runoff Voting…
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) are rigorous statistical procedures meant to detect invalid election results. RLAs examine paper ballots cast during the election to statistically assess the possibility of a disagreement between the winner…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
Most work on manipulation assumes that all preferences are known to the manipulators. However, in many settings elections are open and sequential, and manipulators may know the already cast votes but may not know the future votes. We…
As a paradigm for sequential decision making in unknown environments, reinforcement learning (RL) has received a flurry of attention in recent years. However, the explosion of model complexity in emerging applications and the presence of…
This article extends the analysis of Atkinson, Foley, and Ganz in "Beyond the Spoiler Effect: Can Ranked-Choice Voting Solve the Problem of Political Polarization?". Their work uses a one-dimensional spatial model based on survey data from…
Given a set of agents with approval preferences over each other, we study the task of finding $k$ matchings fairly representing everyone's preferences. We model the problem as an approval-based multiwinner election where the set of…
In many real world elections, agents are not required to rank all candidates. We study three of the most common methods used to modify voting rules to deal with such partial votes. These methods modify scoring rules (like the Borda count),…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental framework for sequential decision-making, in which an agent learns an optimal policy through interactions with an unknown environment. In settings with function approximation, many existing RL…
Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the…
Many democratic political parties hold primary elections, which nicely reflects their democratic nature and promote, among other things, the democratic value of inclusiveness. However, the methods currently used for holding such primary…
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 present the core support criterion, a voting criterion satisfied by Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) that is analogous to the Condorcet criterion but reflective of a different majority rule philosophy. Condorcet methods can be thought of as…
Voting advice applications (VAAs) help millions of voters understand which political parties or candidates best align with their views. This paper explores the potential risks these applications pose to the democratic process when targeted…
U.S. elections rely heavily on computers such as voter registration databases, electronic pollbooks, voting machines, scanners, tabulators, and results reporting websites. These introduce digital threats to election outcomes. Risk-limiting…
For more than a century, election officials across the United States have inspected voting machines before elections using a procedure called Logic and Accuracy Testing (LAT). This procedure consists of election officials casting a test…
In the computational social choice literature, there has been great interest in understanding how computational complexity can act as a barrier against manipulation of elections. Much of this literature, however, makes the assumption that…
We study the computational complexity of candidate control in elections with few voters, that is, we consider the parameterized complexity of candidate control in elections with respect to the number of voters as a parameter. We consider…
We study multiwinner elections with approval-based preferences. An instance of a multiwinner election consists of a set of alternatives, a population of voters---each voter approves a subset of alternatives, and the desired committee size…
In multiagent settings where the agents have different preferences, preference aggregation is a central issue. Voting is a general method for preference aggregation, but seminal results have shown that all general voting protocols are…