A Comparative Study of the Robustness of Voting Systems Under Various Models of Noise

While the study of election theory is not a new field in and of itself, recent research has applied various concepts in computer science to the study of social choice theory, which includes election theory. From a security perspective, it is pertinent to investigate how stable election systems are in the face of noise, disruption, and manipulation. Recently, work related to computational election systems has also been of interest to artificial intelligence researchers, where it is incorporated into the decision-making processes of distributed systems. The quantitative analysis of a voting rule\u27s resistance to noise is the robustness, the probability of how likely the outcome of the election is to change given a certain amount of noise. Prior research has studied the robustness of voting rules under very small amounts of noise, e.g. swapping the ranking of two adjacent candidates in one vote. Our research expands upon this previous work by considering a more disruptive form of noise: an arbitrary reordering of an entire vote. Given k noise disruptions, we determine how likely the election is to remain unchanged (the k-robustness) by relating the k-robustness to the 1-robustness. We can thereby provide upper and/or lower bounds on the robustness of voting rules; specifically, we examine five well-established rules: scoring rules (a general class of rules, containing Borda, plurality, and veto, among others), Copeland, Maximin (also known as Minimax or Simpson-Kramer), Bucklin, and plurality with runoff

10101 Abstracts Collection -- Computational Foundations of Social Choice

From March 7 to March 12, 2010, the Dagstuhl Seminar 10101 ``Computational Foundations of Social Choice \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Anti-Corruption Parties in the CEE. The Causal Effect of Anti-Corruption Party. Success on Established Parties’ Salience Shifts. A Regression Discontinuity Approach

MasteroppgaveSAMPOL350MASV-SAP

Conceptualization of a Blockchain Based Voting Ecosystem in Estonia

Demokraatia on iidsete kreeklaste poolt välja töötatud mõiste, mille tähendus on "inimeste valitsemine". Maailm on arenenud sellest ajast kaugele edasi – impeeriumidest kuningriikideni ning lõpuks jõudnud demokraatiani nagu me seda tänapäeval teame. Praegustes demokraatlikes riikides põhineb rahva poolne juhtimine perioodilistel valimistel, mis viiakse läbi otsese või kaudse hääletamise teel. Hääletamisviisid on olnud kuni 20. sajandini ühtsed, kasutades hääletamissedeleid ja füüsilist loendamist. Tehnoloogia ja tehnika on sellest ajast alates olukorda muutnud, juurutades elektroonilised hääletamismasinad, näiteks Indias, ja elektroonilised hääletamisvõimalused Interneti kaudu, nagu näiteks Eestis, mida kasutatakse järjepidevalt. Kuid kõige selle juures jääb midagi ikkagi lahendamata. Peale kandidaatide või valitsuse valimist võivad ja saavad nad oma kohustusi ja ülesandeid täita ebapiisava korrektsuse, vähese või puuduva vastutuse ning järelevalveta. Isegi pärast valimisi võib valitsus olla oma kodanike seas ebapopulaarne, kuid enne järgmisi valimisi ei ole kodanikel võimalust midagi muuta. See väitekiri aitab selle lünga täita värskelt kasutusele võetud plokiahela ja hajusraamatu tehnoloogia kasutamisega ning ka äsja väljatöötatud uuenduslike kontseptsioonide abil.Democracy is an age-old concept coined by the ancient Greeks meaning, ‘Rule by People’. World has come far from that, from empires, to kingdoms to finally democracy as we know it. In current democracies, the exercise conducted to be ‘Ruled by People’ is based up on periodic elections and those elections are conducted via voting, direct or indirect. The ways of voting have been consistent up until the 20th Century with the use of ballot papers and physical counting. The age of technology and engineering since, have brought about changes to the status quo, with introduction of Electronic Voting Machines such as, in India and Electronic Voting via Internet such as, in Estonia which are practiced in every election. But in all of this, something still remains unresolved. When candidates or in turn a government is elected, they are meagre obliged to perform their duties correctly, with little or no accountability and oversight. Even after elections, a government might be unpopular among its citizens, but the citizens don’t have means to change anything, before the next elections. This thesis helps to fill this gap with use of newly introduced technology of Blockchain and Distributed Ledgers, and also with the help of newly conceptualized innovative concepts

Brokers, voters and clientelism

The book is about distributive politics. The received theories usually predict that parties and governmentswill spend scarce resources on responsive voters. And these responsive voters will be fence-sitters, people who might otherwise not turn out or vote for the party responsible for the distribution but who could be swayed by a favor or a program. Yet over and over again, the evidence seemed to tell us that not fence-sitters but firm party loyalists were the primary beneficiaries of the distributive game. Because we believed in the received theories, we discarded them only reluctantly. Like good Kuhnians, a few anomalies did not shift our paradigm. But eventually the weight of the anomalies was too much. Constructing an alternative theory was only one of the tasks we faced. Our new theory suggested new questions and new observational implications. Many parties can be decomposed into leaders and low-level operatives or brokers. If brokers play the distributive game by different rules than do their leaders, allocations of resources should come out differently when brokers are in control and when leaders are in control. (They do.) If brokers are imperfect agents of party leaders, antimachine reform movements, when they break out, may be driven as much by party leaders as by non-partisan reformers. (In several countries, they have been.) And if brokers are imperfect agents, it should be the case that they impose agency losses on parties and parties should devise elaborate techniques to monitor the brokers and minimize these losses. (We offer evidence that both are true.)Fil: Nazareno, Marcelo. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades. Escuela de Historia; Argentina.Fil: Nazareno, Marcelo. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales; Argentina.Fil: Brusco, Valeria. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales; Argentina.Ciencia Polític

The new european public prosecutor’s office and the rule of law: the case of corruption

The paper addresses the challenges deriving from the European Public Prosecutor’s Office establishment concerning the Rule of law, especially in terms of the certainty and predictability of the law. By analysing the EPPO Regulation 2017/1939, the article will examine the potential biases from the perspective of the Rule of law about the EPPO’s competence, the applicable law, and the judicial review. The main finding will be that, even though EPPO represents the first European body with coercive powers, its operations still rely mainly on the national law of the Member State in which the crime occurred. Such a hybrid system of European prosecution between cooperation and integration might cause a Rule of Law deficit, especially when national criminal law significantly varies among the European Member States. Corruption is a paradigmatic case of such a variation and, therefore, it will be used as a litmus test to illustrate the potential EPPO’s pitfalls in terms of the certainty and predictability of the law and the challenges ahead.Este documento aborda os desafios decorrentes da instituição da Procuradoria Europeia em matéria de Estado de direito, especialmente em termos de segurança e previsibilidade da lei. Ao analisar o Regulamento (UE) 2017/1939, o artigo examinará os potenciais enviesamentos na perspetiva do Estado de direito quanto à competência da Procuradoria Europeia, à lei aplicável e ao controlo jurisdicional. A principal conclusão será que, embora a Procuradoria Europeia represente o primeiro organismo europeu com poderes coercivos, as suas operações continuam a basear-se principalmente na legislação nacional do Estado-Membro em que o crime ocorreu. Um tal sistema híbrido de ação penal europeia entre cooperação e integração poderia causar um défice em matéria de Estado de direito, especialmente quando o direito penal nacional varia significativamente entre os Estados-Membros europeus. A corrupção é um caso paradigmático dessa variação e, por isso, será usada como um teste decisivo para ilustrar as potenciais armadilhas da Procuradoria Europeia em termos de certeza e previsibilidade da lei e dos desafios futuros