We define the highly available local leader election problem, a generalization of the leader election problem for partitionable systems. We propose a protocol that solves the problem efficiently and give some performance measurements of our implementation. The local leader election service has been proven useful in the design and implementation of several fail-aware services for partitionable s...

Do individuals believe that an election victory by their favored candidate will improve their personal economic well-being? Previous work has either adopted an approach that is not well suited to determining this relationship, or ignored this question to focus on perceptions of macroeconomic conditions. In this paper we adopt a new approach that allows us to determine the relationship individua...

To prevent bribery and coercion attacks on voters, current online election schemes rely on strong physical assumptions during the election. We introduce Masked Ballot, an online voting scheme that mitigates these attacks while using a more practical assumption: untappable channels are available but only before the election. During the election voters cast ballots over completely public channels...

We study positional voting rules when candidates and voters are embedded in a common metric space, and cardinal preferences are naturally given by distances in the metric space. In a positional voting rule, each candidate receives a score from each ballot based on the ballot’s rank order; the candidate with the highest total score wins the election. The cost of a candidate is his sum of distanc...

In the leader election problem, n players wish to elect a random leader. The difficulty is that some coalition of players may conspire to elect one of its own members. We adopt the perfect information model: all communication is by broadcast, and the bad players have unlimited computational power. Protocols proceed in rounds: though players are synchronized between rounds, within each round the...

We analyze a model in which voters are uncertain about the policy preferences of candidates. Two forces a¤ect the probability of electoral success: proximity to the median voter and campaign contributions. First, we show how campaign contributions a¤ect elections. Then we show how the candidates may wish to announce a range of policy preferences, rather than a single point. This strategic ambig...

This paper shows that process definition and analysis technologies can be used to reason about the vulnerability of election processes with respect to incorrect or fraudulent behaviors by election officials. The Little-JIL language is used to model example election processes, and various election worker fraudulent behaviors. The FLAVERS finite-state verification system is then used to determine...

While the polls have been the most trusted source for election predictions for decades, in the recent presidential election they were called inaccurate and biased. How inaccurate were the polls in this election and can social media beat the polls as an accurate election predictor? Polls from several news outlet and sentiment analysis on Twitter data were used, in conjunction with the results of...