Schulze and ranked-pairs elections have received attention recently, with the former having quickly become a widely used election system. For many cases these systems have been proven resistant to bribery, control, and manipulation, with ranked pairs being particularly praised for being NPhard for all three of those. Nonetheless, this work shows that with respect to the number of candidates, bo...

Midterm congressional elections provide an interesting testing ground for theories of voting and elections in America. Free from the contamination of national personalities and stylized issues that epitomize presidential campaigns, midterm elections provide a cleaner issue environment for investigating the effects of systematic short-term forces on congressional elections. The seemingly inevita...

Democracy was not a well known term for the Iraqi people till 2003, when the US and coalition forces begun a military action against the Iraqi regime at that time. After that, the new constitution in Iraq allows the citizen to elect the government, the local governments, and the parliament, every 4 years. For this reason, the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) was established to manag...

This paper builds a stochastic model of the processes that give rise to observed patterns of representation and bias in congressional and state legislative elections. The analysis demonstrates that partisan swing and incumbency voting, concepts from the congressional elections literature, have determinate effects on representation and bias, concepts from the redistrictihg literature. The model ...

Elections, as the institution through which citizens choose their political agents, are at the core of representative democracy. It is therefore appropriate that they occupy a central position in the study of democratic politics. The formal analysis of elections traces back to the work of Hotelling (1929), Downs (1957), and Black (1958), who apply mathematical methods to understand the equilibr...

Many research questions in political communication can be answered by representing text as a network of positive or negative relations between actors and issues. This paper presents a system for automatically determining whether these relations are positive or negative by using techniques from Sentiment Analysis. We used a Machine Learning approach trained on the manually annotated news coverag...

Current leadership election algorithms do not explicitly plan for the failure of the leader, and thus must do system wide elections each time a leader fails. To this end we propose an algorithm that removes the need for system wide elections after a leadership failure. Our technique has an initial system wide election to elect a leader, and after the leader is confirmed chooses subordinates wit...

As our voting systems have come to rely more deeply on computer technology there have been great opportunities to improve the voting process, however, recently computer scientists and the general public have become wary of the amount of trust we place in the computers running our elections. Many proposals for audit systems to monitor our elections have been created. One popular audit system is ...

Does complete public financing of campaigns enhance electoral competition? Arizona and Maine implemented similar clean elections programs for state-level races in 2000, providing an opportunity to examine the consequences of public financing. Employing two measures of competitiveness, I find that clean elections programs in both states significantly increased competition in districts where chal...