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 article models the dynamics of this ...

One of the motivations for voting is that one vote can make a difference. In a presidential election, the probability that your vote is decisive is equal to the probability that your state is necessary for an electoral college win, times the probability the vote in your state is tied in that event. We computed these probabilities a week before the 2008 presidential election, using state-by-stat...

We study the election and the naming problems in the asynchronous message passing model. We present a necessary condition based on Angluin’s lifting lemma [Ang80] that must be satisfied by any network that admits a naming (or an election) algorithm. We then show that this necessary condition is also sufficient: we present an election and naming algorithm based on Mazurkiewicz’s algorithm [Maz97...