When the powerful drag their feet

We examine the timing of group decisions that are taken by weighted voting. Decision-making is in two stages. In the second stage, players vote on a policy restriction. In the first stage, players vote to determine the timing of the second-stage decision: “early”, before players’ types are revealed, or “late”. Players differ in both size and voting power. We show that players with greater power tend to prefer a late vote, whereas less powerful players tend to want to vote early. By contrast, large players tend to prefer an early vote and small players a late vote. We present evidence from the literatures on corporate governance, international relations, European Union governance, and oil extraction. We examine an extension in which players choose the qualified majority threshold besides the timing of the second-stage vote

Mandatory Vote Count Audit

Voters, candidates, citizens and election officials want high confidence in the integrity of the election process by subjecting electronic vote counts to independent manual audits; and by making reports available with which to evaluate rates of voter turnout, voting equipment allocation, under-votes, over-votes, spoiled ballots, voting equipment failure, absentee ballots, uncounted ballots, and provisional ballots. This bill requires routine independent audits of vote count accuracy and requires the release to vote count auditors of records and information necessary to verify the integrity of the vote count audits and to evaluate voter service levels

2020 NH Primary Voters Found It Easy to Vote, Confident Vote was Counted Accurately 4/14/2020

The vast majority of voters in New Hampshire\u27s First in the Nation primary found it easy to vote; more than ninety percent of primary participants said it was very or somewhat easy to vote while only one in twenty said it was somewhat or very difficult to do so. More than four in five primary voters were very confident their vote was accurately counted while nearly all of the rest were somewhat confident. When asked about a month before the election, likely voters had been slightly more pessimistic about their perceived ease of voting in the primary and their confidence that their vote would be accurately counted

Disenfranchising America’s Youth: How Current Voting Laws Are Contrary to the Intent of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment

[Excerpt] “Laws attempting to suppress student voters are not a new advent. Since the Twenty-Sixth Amendment lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen in 1971, states have been passing legislation that has challenged, restricted, and continuously narrowed the eligibility of students to vote. The reasoning behind these laws generally focuses on the belief that student voters dilute the power of permanent resident voters, tend to vote in democratic blocks, and are not sufficiently invested in the community. Regardless of the motivation, these voting laws often have the effect of disenfranchising non-informed students, who either miss the opportunity to vote in their own state or decide not to vote due to the lack of excitement involved in absentee voting.

Socially Optimal Districting: An Empirical Investigation

This paper provides an empirical exploration of the potential gains from socially optimal districting. As emphasized in the political science literature, districting matters because it determines the seat-vote curve, which relates the fraction of seats parties obtain to their share of the aggregate vote. Building on the theoretical work of Coate and Knight (2006), which develops and analyzes the optimal seat-vote curve, this paper develops a methodology for computing actual and optimal seat-vote curves and for measuring the potential welfare gains that would emerge from implementing optimal seat-vote curves. This method is then applied to analyze districting plans in place during the 1990s to elect U.S. State legislators. The analysis shows that the plans used by the states in our data set generate seat-vote curves that are overly responsive to changes in voters' preferences. While there is significant variation across states, the potential welfare gains from implementing optimal seat-vote curves are on average small relative to the overall surplus generated by legislatures. This appears to be because seat-vote curves are reasonably close to optimal rather than because aggregate welfare is insensitive to varying districting plans. Interestingly, implementing proportional representation would produce welfare levels quite close to those achieved by implementing optimal seat-vote curves.

Judge:Don't Vote!

This article explains why the traditional model of the theory of social choice misrepresents reality, it cannot lead to acceptable methods of ranking and electing in any case, and a more realistic model leads inevitably to one method of ranking and electing—majority judgment—that best meets the traditional criteria of what constitutes a good method.Arrow's paradox ; Condorcet's paradox ; Majority judgment ; Skating ; Social choice ; Strategic manipulation ; Voting

Vote-boosting ensembles

Vote-boosting is a sequential ensemble learning method in which the individual classifiers are built on different weighted versions of the training data. To build a new classifier, the weight of each training instance is determined in terms of the degree of disagreement among the current ensemble predictions for that instance. For low class-label noise levels, especially when simple base learners are used, emphasis should be made on instances for which the disagreement rate is high. When more flexible classifiers are used and as the noise level increases, the emphasis on these uncertain instances should be reduced. In fact, at sufficiently high levels of class-label noise, the focus should be on instances on which the ensemble classifiers agree. The optimal type of emphasis can be automatically determined using cross-validation. An extensive empirical analysis using the beta distribution as emphasis function illustrates that vote-boosting is an effective method to generate ensembles that are both accurate and robust