Privacy is a necessary requirement for voting. Without privacy, voters can be forced to vote in specific ways, and the forcing party can check their compliance. But offering privacy does not suffice: if a voter can reduce her privacy, an attacker can force her to do so. In this paper, we distinguish various ways that a voter can communicate with the intruder to reduce her privacy and classify t...

Example 6.1 Consider an election with three alternatives, a, b, and c, and three voters, 1, 2, and 3. Suppose the rule used is plurality—an alternative gets a point each time it is ranked first by a voter, and the alternative with the most points wins—with ties broken towards alternatives earlier in the alphabet. Suppose voter 3 knows (or strongly suspects) that voter 1 will rank a first in her...

We characterize the outcome of majority voting for single–peaked preferences on median spaces. This large class of preferences covers a variety of multi–dimensional policy spaces including products of lines (e.g. grids), trees, and hypercubes. Our main result is the following: If a Condorcet winner (i.e. a winner in pairwise majority voting) exists, then it coincides with the appropriately defi...

We study the formation of advocacy groups and how they can impact policy outcomes by revealing information about voters’ preferences to uninformed political candidates. We conduct a laboratory experiment based on a two-candidate spatial electoral competition setting where the policy preferences of voters are (initially) unknown and change over time. In the control treatment candidates learn abo...

A voting scheme constitutes an essential component of many fault tolerant systems. Two types of voters are commonly used in applications of real-valued systems: the inexact majority and the amalgamating voters. The inexact majority voter effectively isolates erroneous modules and is capable of reporting benign outputs when a significant disagreement is detected. However, an application specific...

Abstract We study the problem of aggregating discounted utility preferences into a social preference model. use an axiom capturing responsibility individuals’ attitudes to time, called consensus Pareto. show that this can provide consistent foundations for welfare judgments. Moreover, in conjunction with standard axioms anonymity and continuity, Pareto help adjudicate some fundamental issues re...

This paper shows how political parties differentiate to reduce electoral competition. Two parties choose platforms in a unidimensional policy space, and then candidates from these parties compete for votes in a continuum of constituencies with different median voters. Departing from their parties’ platforms is costly enough that candidates do not take the median voter’s preferred position in ev...

Redundancy techniques are commonly used to design dependable systems to ensure high reliability, availability and data integrity. Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) is a widely used redundancy technique that masks faults. In a TMR system, we have three implementations of the same logic function and their outputs are voted using a voter circuit. In this paper, we present a new voter design called t...