4,510 research outputs found
The Ranking Problem of Alternatives as a Cooperative Game
This paper considers the ranking problem of candidates for a certain position
based on ballot papers filled by voters. We suggest a ranking procedure of
alternatives using cooperative game theory methods. For this, it is necessary
to construct a characteristic function via the filled ballot paper profile of
voters. The Shapley value serves as the ranking method. The winner is the
candidate having the maximum Shapley value. And finally, we explore the
properties of the designed ranking procedure
Exit polling and racial bloc voting: Combining individual-level and RC ecological data
Despite its shortcomings, cross-level or ecological inference remains a
necessary part of some areas of quantitative inference, including in United
States voting rights litigation. Ecological inference suffers from a lack of
identification that, most agree, is best addressed by incorporating
individual-level data into the model. In this paper we test the limits of such
an incorporation by attempting it in the context of drawing inferences about
racial voting patterns using a combination of an exit poll and precinct-level
ecological data; accurate information about racial voting patterns is needed to
assess triggers in voting rights laws that can determine the composition of
United States legislative bodies. Specifically, we extend and study a hybrid
model that addresses two-way tables of arbitrary dimension. We apply the hybrid
model to an exit poll we administered in the City of Boston in 2008. Using the
resulting data as well as simulation, we compare the performance of a pure
ecological estimator, pure survey estimators using various sampling schemes and
our hybrid. We conclude that the hybrid estimator offers substantial benefits
by enabling substantive inferences about voting patterns not practicably
available without its use.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS353 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Election Forensics and the 2004 Venezuelan Presidential Recall Referendum as a Case Study
A referendum to recall President Hugo Ch\'{a}vez was held in Venezuela in
August of 2004. In the referendum, voters were to vote YES if they wished to
recall the President and NO if they wanted him to continue in office. The
official results were 59% NO and 41% YES. Even though the election was
monitored by various international groups including the Organization of
American States and the Carter Center (both of which declared that the
referendum had been conducted in a free and transparent manner), the outcome of
the election was questioned by other groups both inside and outside of
Venezuela. The collection of manuscripts that comprise this issue of
Statistical Science discusses the general topic of election forensics but also
focuses on different statistical approaches to explore, post-election, whether
irregularities in the voting, vote transmission or vote counting processes
could be detected in the 2004 presidential recall referendum. In this
introduction to the Venezuela issue, we discuss the more recent literature on
post-election auditing, describe the institutional context for the 2004
Venezuelan referendum, and briefly introduce each of the five contributions.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-STS379 the Statistical
Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
The design of political institutions: Electoral competition and the choice of ballot access restrictions in the United States
Recent contributions to the political economics literature (Trebbi et al. 2007; Aghion et al. 2004) have challenged the view that political institutions are exogenous to the behavior of agents in the political arena. We explicitly address the potential endogeneity of institu- tions by examining the link between the degree of political competition and the design of ballot access restrictions in the United States. Exploiting exogenous variation in electoral competition at the state level induced by the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, our main finding is that restrictions to the entry of non-major party candidates have been systemat- ically adjusted to changing degrees of electoral competition. As a consequence, differences in ballot access requirements between states are endogenous in the sense that they reflect differences in electoral competition.Political institutions, electoral competition, ballot access
Distributed Protocols at the Rescue for Trustworthy Online Voting
While online services emerge in all areas of life, the voting procedure in
many democracies remains paper-based as the security of current online voting
technology is highly disputed. We address the issue of trustworthy online
voting protocols and recall therefore their security concepts with its trust
assumptions. Inspired by the Bitcoin protocol, the prospects of distributed
online voting protocols are analysed. No trusted authority is assumed to ensure
ballot secrecy. Further, the integrity of the voting is enforced by all voters
themselves and without a weakest link, the protocol becomes more robust. We
introduce a taxonomy of notions of distribution in online voting protocols that
we apply on selected online voting protocols. Accordingly, blockchain-based
protocols seem to be promising for online voting due to their similarity with
paper-based protocols
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