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...

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...

The Supreme Court decided 402 election law cases during the twentieth century. That statistic, and lots of other helpful information, is gleaned from the excellent summary of election law written by Rick Hasen. Professor Hasen is the nation’s most prolific election law scholar: co-author of an election law casebook, host of the leading election law web site, and author of numerous law review ar...

Election incidents – where the elections system fails voters – are of increasing concern with the dramatic rise in the use of computerized electronic voting machines that store vote records in computer memory. The Election Protection Coalition (EPC) used a web-based election incident recording and reporting tool called the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) developed by the Verified Voti...

In the debate about partisan election administration, little attention has been focused on the views of local election officials. Election officials can be purveyors of partisanship as well as observers of the election administration environment. We use a series of national surveys of local election officials to examine the degree to which local officials of opposing parties have different poli...

A possible winner of an election is a candidate that has, in some kind of incomplete-information election, the possibility to win in a complete extension of the election. The first type of problem we study is the Possible co-Winner with respect to the Addition of New Candidates (PcWNA) problem, which asks, given an election with strict preferences over the candidates, is it possible to make a d...

In this paper, we provide eecient broadcasting and election algorithms in unoriented hypercubes. First, O(N) broadcasting and traversing algorithms are introduced, where N is the number of hy-percube vertices. This answers aarmatively the open question stated in Tel95a] whether linear-message broadcasting and traversing can be achieved on hypercubes without sense of direction. Moreover, by expl...

The second significant digits of precinct-level (or polling station-level) vote counts follow regular patterns when voters are acting strategically and when there are partisan imbalances of voters in districts (when there is a gerrymander). The digits often follow distinctive patterns when vote counts are affected by coercion. The patterns are illustrated by a simulation exercise that generates...

This paper concerns randomized leader election in synchronous distributed networks. A distributed leader election algorithm is presented for complete n-node networks that runs in O(1) rounds and (with high probability) uses only O( √ n log n) messages to elect a unique leader (with high probability). When considering the “explicit” variant of leader election where eventually every node knows th...