Other than standard election disruptions involving shenanigans, strategic voting, and so forth, it is reasonable to expect that elections are free from difficulties. But this is far from being true; even sincere election outcomes admit all sorts of counterintuitive conclusions. For instance, suppose after the winner of an important departmental election was announced, it was discovered that eve...

This paper analyzes the Diebold Election Systems, Inc. election management software (GEMS) using publicly accessible postings of GEMS election databases. It finds that the GEMS architecture fails to conform to fundamental database design principles and software industry standards for ensuring accurate data. Thus, in election tabulations, aspects of the GEMS design can lead to, or fail to protec...

We must properly model attacks and the preferences of the electorate for the computational study of attacks on elections to give us insight into the hardness of attacks in practice. Theoretical and empirical analysis are equally important methods to understand election attacks. I discuss my recent work on domain restrictions on partial preferences and on new election attacks. I propose further ...

Since 1993, the UBC Election Stock Market Project (UBC-ESM) in the Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration at the University of British Columbia has been operating “election stock markets”. These stock markets test the ability—long appreciated by economists—of markets to aggregate and disseminate information.1 They show how the information gathered by markets from buyers and sellers, wh...

Game theory has grown in importance as academics from all fields have realized the importance of strategy in domains of human behavior ranging from business to the Internet. The computational issues of game theory are important to both a game’s participants and designers. A participant in a game, or their consultant, obviously wants to compute their optimal moves in anticipation of their opppon...

In the interest of auditing election procedures, certain electronic voting technologies provide monitoring capabilities that record select actions undertaken by election officials before, during, and after an election process, as well as the conditions present in an electronic voting terminal as the result of its interactions with its environment. In this paper we report on an automated auditin...

We study the (parameterized) complexity of a combinatorial problem, motivated by the desire to publish elections-related data, while preserving the privacy of the voters (humans or agents). In this problem, introduced and defined here, we are given an election, a voting rule, and a distance function over elections. The task is to find an election which is not too far away from the original elec...

Sam Wang is a pioneer in using statistical methods to analyze U.S. presidential election polls. In this election season interview with Neuron, he discusses diagnosing partisan gerrymandering, his research on the cerebellum, and how he analyzes polls with high accuracy.

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This paper provides an interpretation of the uncertainty that exists at the beginning of the day of an election as to who will win. It is based on the theory that there are a number of possible conditions of nature that can exist on election day, of which one is drawn. Political betting markets like Intrade provide a way of trying to estimate this uncertainty. It is argued that polling standard...