Tactical Voting in Plurality Elections

How often will elections end in landslides? What is the probability for a head-to-head race? Analyzing ballot results from several large countries rather anomalous and yet unexplained distributions have been observed. We identify tactical voting as the driving ingredient for the anomalies and introduce a model to study its effect on plurality elections, characterized by the relative strength of the feedback from polls and the pairwise interaction between individuals in the society. With this model it becomes possible to explain the polarization of votes between two candidates, understand the small margin of victories frequently observed for different elections, and analyze the polls' impact in American, Canadian, and Brazilian ballots. Moreover, the model reproduces, quantitatively, the distribution of votes obtained in the Brazilian mayor elections with two, three, and four candidates.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Third Party Candidates in Political Debates: Muted Groups Struggling to Express Themselves

With the rise of a multitude of political parties, some campaign debate organizers are beginning to include third party candidates in their public debates. However, these third party candidates have been ignored in campaign debate literature. This study analyzed the transcripts of three campaign debates that included third party candidates, using muted group theory to understand the impact of third party candidates in campaign debates. The analysis demonstrates that third party candidates experience the communication obstacles of muted groups. Since World War II, party affiliation among U.S. voters and straight-ticket voting has been on the decline (Miller & Shanks, 1996). Fewer and fewer people vote, perhaps because they feel their vote doesn’t make a difference, they think that politics is inherently corrupt, or they just don’t care. In this vacuum of political disaffection and apathy, a large number of independent parties have sprung up, seeking to revitalize voters by offering them alternative visions of government and alternative choices for elected officials. At present more than 100 independent parties can be identified in the US, some operating in only very circumscribed regions or with very narrow platforms (Sachs, 2003). However, these parties on a large or small scale manage to place their candidates on ballots and attempt to garner limited media attention for their causes. As some of these parties have gained at least local prominence, they have been included in campaign debates, although rarely on the presidential level (with the exception of Ross Perot in 1992 and John Anderson in 1980). Since our nation is so deeply entrenched in a two-party system, these alternative candidates are viewed with suspicion by major parties who see them as threats to their own electability because they are perceived as spoilers, stealing the votes that somehow should belong to one or the other of the major candidates. In this paper, I will refer to any candidate who is not affiliated with the two major parties as “third party.” The purpose of this study is to explore how inclusion of third party candidates in campaign debates affects the dynamics of the debate. Literature Review As pointed out by McKinney and Carlin (in pres

Entropic Analysis of Votes Expressed in Italian Elections between 1948 and 2018

open access articleIn Italy, the elections occur often, indeed almost every year the citizens are involved in a democratic choice for deciding leaders of different administrative entities. Sometimes the citizens are called to vote for filling more than one office in more than one administrative body. This phenomenon has occurred 35 times after 1948; it creates the peculiar condition of having the same sample of people expressing decisions on political bases at the same time. Therefore, the Italian contemporaneous ballots constitute the occasion to measure coherence and chaos in the way of expressing political opinion. In this paper, we address all the Italian elections that occurred between 1948and2018. Wecollectthenumberofvotesperpartyateachadministrativelevelandwetreateach electionasamanifestationofacomplexsystem. Then,weusetheShannonentropyandtheGiniIndex to study the degree of disorder manifested during different types of elections at the municipality level. A particular focus is devoted to the contemporaneous elections. Such cases implicate different disorder dynamics in the contemporaneous ballots, when different administrative level are involved. Furthermore, some features that characterize different entropic regimes have emerged

Governance in Social Media: A case study of the Wikipedia promotion process

Social media sites are often guided by a core group of committed users engaged in various forms of governance. A crucial aspect of this type of governance is deliberation, in which such a group reaches decisions on issues of importance to the site. Despite its crucial --- though subtle --- role in how a number of prominent social media sites function, there has been relatively little investigation of the deliberative aspects of social media governance. Here we explore this issue, investigating a particular deliberative process that is extensive, public, and recorded: the promotion of Wikipedia admins, which is determined by elections that engage committed members of the Wikipedia community. We find that the group decision-making at the heart of this process exhibits several fundamental forms of relative assessment. First we observe that the chance that a voter will support a candidate is strongly dependent on the relationship between characteristics of the voter and the candidate. Second we investigate how both individual voter decisions and overall election outcomes can be based on models that take into account the sequential, public nature of the voting

A privacy-preserving, decentralized and functional Bitcoin e-voting protocol

Bitcoin, as a decentralized digital currency, has caused extensive research interest. There are many studies based on related protocols on Bitcoin, Bitcoin-based voting protocols also received attention in related literature. In this paper, we propose a Bitcoin-based decentralized privacy-preserving voting mechanism. It is assumed that there are n voters and m candidates. The candidate who obtains t ballots can get x Bitcoins from each voter, namely nx Bitcoins in total. We use a shuffling mechanism to protect voter's voting privacy, at the same time, decentralized threshold signatures were used to guarantee security and assign voting rights. The protocol can achieve correctness, decentralization and privacy-preservings. By contrast with other schemes, our protocol has a smaller number of transactions and can achieve a more functional voting method.Comment: 5 pages;3 figures;Smartworld 201

Stylized facts in Brazilian vote distributions

Elections, specially in countries such as Brazil with an electorate of the order of 100 million people, yield large-scale data-sets embodying valuable information on the dynamics through which individuals influence each other and make choices. In this work we perform an extensive analysis of data sets available for Brazilian proportional elections of legislators and city councillors throughout the period 1970-2012, which embraces two distinct political regimes: a military dictatorship and a democratic phase. Through the distribution $P(v)$ of the number of candidates receiving $v$ votes, we perform a comparative analysis of different elections in the same calendar and as a function of time. The distributions $P(v)$ present a scale-free regime with a power-law exponent $\alpha$ which is not universal and appears to be characteristic of the electorate. Moreover, we observe that $\alpha$ typically increases with time. We propose a multi-species model consisting in a system of nonlinear differential equations with stochastic parameters that allows to understand the empirical observations. We conclude that the power-law exponent $\alpha$ constitutes a measure of the degree of feedback of the electorate interactions. To know the interactivity of the population is relevant beyond the context of elections, since a similar feedback may occur in other social contagion processes.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, a version with some modifications was published in PLoS ON

A networked voting rule for democratic representation

We introduce a general framework for exploring the problem of selecting a committee of representatives with the aim of studying a networked voting rule based on a decentralized large-scale platform, which can assure a strong accountability of the elected. The results of our simulations suggest that this algorithm-based approach is able to obtain a high representativeness for relatively small committees, performing even better than a classical voting rule based on a closed list of candidates. We show that a general relation between committee size and representatives exists in the form of an inverse square root law and that the normalized committee size approximately scales with the inverse of the community size, allowing the scalability to very large populations. These findings are not strongly influenced by the different networks used to describe the individuals interactions, except for the presence of few individuals with very high connectivity which can have a marginally negative effect in the committee selection process.Comment: Submitted for publicatio