Uruguay under Juan Idiarte Borda: An American Diplomat’s Observations

Unweighted Coalitional Manipulation under the Borda Rule Is NP-Hard

The Borda voting rule is a positional scoring rule where, for m candidates, for every vote the first candidate receives m− 1 points, the second m− 2 points and so on. A Borda winner is a candidate with highest total score. It has been a prominent open problem to determine the computational complexity of UNWEIGHTED COALITIONAL MANIPULATION UNDER BORDA: Can one add a certain number of additional ...

An Empirical Study of Borda Manipulation

We study the problem of coalitional manipulation in elections using the unweighted Borda rule. We provide empirical evidence of the manipulability of Borda elections in the form of two new greedy manipulation algorithms based on intuitions from the bin-packing and multiprocessor scheduling domains. Although we have not been able to show that these algorithms beat existing methods in the worst-c...

On Cuba , Diplomats , Ultrasound , and Intermodulation Distortion

This technical report analyzes how ultrasound could have led to the AP news recordings of metallic sounds reportedly heard by diplomats in Cuba. Beginning with screen shots of the acoustic spectral plots from the AP news, we reverse engineered ultrasonic signals that could lead to those outcomes as a result of intermodulation distortion and non-linearities of the acoustic transmission medium. W...

Borda Working Papers

Probabilistic Borda rule voting

An alternative voting system, referred to as probabilistic Borda rule, is developed and analyzed. The winning alternative under this system is chosen by lottery where the weights are determined from each alternative’s Borda score relative to all Borda points possible. Advantages of the lottery include the elimination of strategic voting on the set of alternatives under consideration and breakin...