Statistical benchmarking of voting theory methods

Statistical Methods for Detecting Anomalous Voting Patterns: A Case Study

A Theory of Benchmarking

Lilja (2005) states that “In the field of computer science and engineering there is surprisingly little agreement on how to measure something as fundamental as the performance of a computer system.”. The field lacks of the most fundamental element for sharing measures and results: an appropriate metric to express performance. Since the introduction of laptops and mobile devices, there has been ...

Statistical evaluation of voting rules

We generate synthetic elections using two sources of survey data, two spatial models, and two standard models from the voting literature, IAC and IC. For each election that we generate, we test whether each of 54 voting rules is (1) non-manipulable, and (2) efficient in the sense of maximizing summed utilities. We find that Hare and Condorcet-Hare are the most strategy-resistant non-dictatorial...

Statistical Robustness of Voting Rules

We introduce a notion of “statistical robustness” for voting rules. We say that a voting rule is statistically robust if the winner for a profile of ballots is most likely to be the winner of any random sample of the profile, for any positive sample size. We show that some voting rules, such as plurality, veto, and random ballot, are statistically robust, while others, such as approval, score v...

Statistical Decision Theory: Concepts, Methods and Applications