With many states beginning to require manual audits of election ballots, comparing the auditability of different types of ballot systems has become an important issue. Because the majority of counties in the United States are now using either Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems equipped with Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) modules or optical scan ballot systems, we examine...

Voters determine their preferences over alternatives based on cases (or arguments) that are raised in the public debate. Each voter is characterized by a matrix, measuring how much support each case lends to each alternative, and her ranking is additive in cases. We show that the majority vote in such a society can be any function from sets of cases to binary relations over alternatives. A simi...

We study the voter model with a finite density of zealots—voters that never change opinion. For equal numbers of zealots of each species, the distribution of magnetization (opinions) is Gaussian in the mean-field limit, as well as in one and two dimensions, with a width that is proportional to 1/ √ Z, where Z is the number of zealots, independent of the total number of voters. Thus just a few z...

The majority of work in judgment aggregation is devoted to the study of impossibility results. However the (social) dependencies that may exist between the voters has received less attention. In this extended abstract we use the degree centrality measure from social network analysis and obtain a correspondence between the average voter rule and this measure, and show that approach can lead to m...

In the first part of this lecture, we analyze the noise sensitivity of the Majority function in more detail than last time. In the second part, we discuss the Majority is Stablest theorem, which says that among balanced functions for which each of the individual variables has low influence, the Majority function has the lowest noise sensitivity up to some small error. We also see some applicati...

We study the competitive equilibrium of a market for votes where the choice is binary and it is known that a majority of the voters supports one of the two alternatives. Voters can trade votes for a numeraire before making a decision via majority rule. We identify a sufficient condition guaranteeing the existence of an ex ante equilibrium. In equilibrium, only the most intense voter on each sid...

All voter-verifiable voting schemes in the literature require that the voter be able to see and to mark. This paper describes modifications to the Prêt à Voter and PunchScan schemes so that a voter who can either see or hear, or both, independent of marking ability, may avail of voter-verifiability without revealing her vote. The modified systems would provide privacy and integrity guarantees t...

We present a voter verifiable Internet voting scheme which provides anonymity and eliminates the danger of vote selling even if the computer used by the voter cannot be fully trusted. The ballots cast remain anonymous even the machine does not know the choice of the voter. It makes no sense to buy votes the voter can cheat the buyer even if his machine cooperates with the buyer. Nevertheless, t...