Most theoretical definitions about the complexity of manipulating elections focus on the decision problem of recognizing which instances can be successfully manipulated, rather than the search problem of finding the successful manipulative actions. Since the latter is a far more natural goal for manipulators, that definitional focus may be misguided if these two complexities can differ. Our mai...

Previous models of the popular vote in U.S. Presidential elections emphasize economic growth and price stability, the role of parties and incumbency, and pre-election expectations for the future. Despite the closeness of the pre-election polls in 2004, formal models instead predict a landslide victory for President Bush. An obvious question is whether this anomaly arises, at least in part, from...

Predicting election winners (or, election possible winners) is an important topic in computational social choice. Very generally put, we consider the following setting: There is some set of candidates C and some set of voters V (with preferences over C). We either do not know which candidates will take part in the election or we do not know which voters will cast their votes. However, for each ...

In this paper we document a strong correlation between the use of primaries and the transition from “party-based” voting to “candidate-oriented” voting in U.S. statewide elections. First, at the aggregate level we find that the direct primary is associated with a significant increase in “split-ticket” voting, both across states and within states over time. Second, we use a new data set of count...

A Leader is a Coordinator that supports a set of processes to cooperate a given task. This concept is used in several domains such as distributed systems, parallelism and cooperative support for cooperative work. In completely asynchronous systems, there is no solution for the election problem satisfying both of safety and liveness properties in asynchronous distributed systems. Therefore, to s...

A time series (t=921) of weekly survey data on vote intentions in the Netherlands for the period 1978-1995 shows that the percentage of undecided voters follows a cyclical pattern over the election calendar. The otherwise substantial percentage of undecided voters decreases sharply in weeks leading up to an election and gradually increases afterwards. This paper models the dynamics of this asym...

The 2000 presidential election was the most controversial U.S. election in recent history, mainly due to the disputed outcome of the election in Florida. Elsewhere in this issue, Richard Smith analyzes the high vote for Pat Buchanan in Palm Beach county. As background for his article, we summarize this and other voting-related issues that may have affected the outcome of the election in Florida...

We study the problem of real-time leader election in a shared memory environment. This problem requires a single processor to be distinguished as the leader and requires an upper bound on the duration for which no leader is present. This processor can be used to provide services which must be continuously available. Coan and Thomas proposed a protocol for this problem which requires O(log N) ti...

We consider the problem of electing a leader on a ring of nameless processors by de terministic and self stabilizing protocols A processor can read the state of its neighbors and its own state to determine if it is enabled A central demon scheduler picks an enabled processor to make an atomic move In an atomic move the processor changes to a new state which is a function of its old state and th...