Schulze voting is a recently introduced voting system enjoying unusual popularity and a high degree of real-world use, with users including the Wikimedia foundation, several branches of the Pirate Party, and MTV. It is a Condorcet voting system that determines the winners of an election using information about paths in a graph representation of the election. We resolve the complexity of many el...

Schulze voting is a recently introduced voting system enjoying unusual popularity and a high degree of real-world use, with users including the Wikimedia foundation, several branches of the Pirate Party, and MTV. It is a Condorcet voting system that determines the winners of an election using information about paths in a graph representation of the election. We resolve the complexity of many el...

Several distributed algorithms require that there be a coordinator process in the entire system. Since all other processes in the system have to interact with the coordinator, they all must agree on who the coordinator is. Furthermore, if the coordinator process fails due to the failure of the site on which it is located, a new coordinator process must be elected to take up the job of the faile...

Leader election is an important protocol in distributed computing. The objective of the protocol is to decide which process among all contributing processes in the system should be offer a particular functionality after a system crash long enough. There are two basic properties that the leader election implementation needs to obey: (1) safety: it is never the case that there are two or more lea...

Competitive political parties and election campaigns are central to the health of democracies. Parties and campaigns require significant resources to be effective. India has developed complex election expenditure, political party funding, and reporting and disclosure laws. We suggest that these laws may have perverse impacts on the electoral system: they tend to drive campaign expenditure under...

In this paper we consider the problem of distributed leader election in unoriented Abelian Cayley graphs of degree 4. This family of graphs, denoted by C G 4, include bidimensional tori of arbitrary size and chordal rings with one arbitrary chord. We present an algorithm which assumes that the only structural knowledge available to the nodes is “I am in an Abelian Cayley Graph of degree 4”. The...

Palamidessi has shown that the π-calculus with mixed choice is powerful enough to solve the leader election problem on a symmetric ring of processes. We show that this is also possible in the calculus of Mobile Ambients (MA), without using communication or restriction. Following Palamidessi’s methods, we deduce that there is no encoding satisfying certain conditions from MA into CCS. We also sh...

Scoring protocols are a broad class of voting systems. Each is defined by a vector (α1, α2, . . . , αm), α1 ≥ α2 ≥ · · · ≥ αm, of integers such that each voter contributes α1 points to his/her first choice, α2 points to his/her second choice, and so on, and any candidate receiving the most points is a winner. What is it about scoring-protocol election systems that makes some have the desirable ...

We present a technique for mapping a theoretical distributed algorithm to a set of homogeneous agents that solves the general distributed control problem know as election. Election is a decentralized, cooperative information task where one system or node from n is elected as the leader. Our solution is as efficient as the theoretical election distributed algorithm, but does not rely on message ...