Further Support for Ranking Candidates in Elections

A discussion is presented regarding the single-stage election procedures Plurality, Negative Plurality, and Borda Rules; with an emphasis on their Condorcet Efficiency, which measures their propensity to elect the Condorcet Winner. A theoretical analysis shows how the Condorcet Efficiency of these voting rules change as the various measures of group mutual coherence change. Both Plurality and Negative Plurality Rules are found to perform very poorly over identifiable ranges of the defined measures of group mutual coherence. While Borda Rule is not always found to be the most Condorcet Efficient single-stage rule in all scenarios, it never performs poorly under any scenario. These theoretical results are then reinforced by empirically-based analysis to show very solid support for using Borda Rule, despite some concerns that have been expressed that Borda Rule requires voters to rank candidates, while Plurality and Negative Plurality Rules do not.

In collective decision making, where a voting rule is used to take a\ncollective decision among a group of agents, manipulation by one or more agents\nis usually considered negative behavior to be avoided, or at least to be made\ncomputationally difficult for the agents to perform. However, there are\nscenarios in which a restricted form of manipulation can instead be beneficial.\nIn this paper we consider the iterative version of several voting rules, where\nat each step one agent is allowed to manipulate by modifying his ballot\naccording to a set of restricted manipulation moves which are computationally\neasy and require little information to be performed. We prove convergence of\niterative voting rules when restricted manipulation is allowed, and we present\nexperiments showing that most iterative voting rules have a higher Condorcet\nefficiency than their non-iterative version.\n

We use preference data from the 2015 parliament election in the Austrian federal state of Styria to analyze different voting rules. An exit poll right after the election collected data on ordinal and cardinal preferences from approximately 1000 actual voters. Our analysis is threefold. First, we determine the hypothetical social outcomes under different voting rules; second, we investigate the stability of the outcomes under those rules. Finally, we provide a categorization of different types of parties and analyze the impact of certain voting rules (Plurality Rule, Plurality Run Off, Hare System, Condorcet Method, Approval Voting, Borda Rule, Evaluative Voting, and Majority Judgment) on the performances of parties in those scenarios.

The standard two-stage voting rules Plurality Elimination and Negative Plurality Elimination are evaluated relative to Borda Rule on the basis of Condorcet Efficiency. Theoretical analysis shows that the Condorcet Efficiency of these two-stage voting rules consistently marginally dominate Borda Rule as the various measures of group mutual coherence change. However, it is also found that the probability that either of the two-stage rules will elect a different candidate than the winner by Borda Rule is quite small. Empirically-based analysis reinforces this observation to lead to the general conclusion that the additional effort that is required to use a two-stage voting rule, rather than simply using Borda Rule, is not likely to be worthwhile. Other benefits are considered that result from using Borda Rule rather than a two-stage voting rule.

This paper combines social choice theory with mathematical optimization by applying various group decision concepts to a classical problem of combinatorial optimization, namely the famous traveling salesperson (sales- man) problem. The aim of the latter is to find a tour through all vertices of a given graph along edges of minimal total cost. In this contribution we replace the measure of additive edge costs by the social acceptance of different edges and the resulting tours. In particular, for four different voting rules, the Borda rule, Approval voting, Plurality rule and Simple Majority rule, we will investi- gate the social acceptance of tours derived from global and local decisions. It will be shown that these two decision approaches can lead to widely varying results.

Which Voting Rule is Most Likely to Choose the 'Best' Candidate?

A voting rule is monotonic if a winning candidate never becomes a loser by being raised in voters’ rankings of candidates, ceteris paribus. Plurality with a runoff is known to fail monotonicity. To see how widespread this failure is, we focus on French presidential elections since 1965. We identify mathematical conditions that allow a logically conceivable scenario of vote shifts between candidates that may lead to a monotonicity violation. We show that eight among the ten elections held since 1965 (those in 1965 and 1974 being the exceptions) exhibit this theoretical vulnerability. To be sure, the conceived scenario of vote shifts that enables a monotonicity violation may not be plausible under the political context of the considered election. Thus, we analyze the political landscape of these eight elections and argue that for two of them (2002 and 2007 elections), the monotonicity violation scenario was plausible within the conjuncture of the time.

Under approval voting (AV), each voter just distinguishes the candidates he approves of from those appearing as unacceptable. The preference approval voting (PAV) is a hybrid version of the approval voting first introduced by Brams and Sanver (in: Brams, Gehrlein, Roberts (eds) The mathematics of preference, choice and order. Springer, Berlin, pp 215–237, 2009). Under PAV, each voter ranks all the candidates and then indicates the ones he approves. In this paper, we provide an analytical representation of the limiting probability that PAV elects the Condorcet winner (resp. the Condorcet loser) when she exists in three-candidate elections. We perform our analysis by assuming the assumption of the Extended Impartial Culture. The aim is to measure at which extend PAV performs better than AV both on the propensity of electing the Condorcet winner and on that of the non-election of the Condorcet loser. For this purpose, we also provide an analytical representation of the limiting probability that AV elects the Condorcet winner (resp. the Condorcet loser) when she exists in three-candidate elections. Our representation of the limiting probability that AV elects the Condorcet winner is more general than that provided by Diss et al. (in: Laslier and Sanver (eds) Handbook on approval voting. Springer, Berlin, pp 255–283, 2010) and it leads to the same figures as the representation provided by Gehrlein and Lepelley (Group Decis Negot 24:243–269, 2015).

This study addresses the challenges employers face in screening the large number of resumes received for job positions. We aim to ensure fair evaluation of candidates, reduce bias, and increase the efficiency of the candidate evaluation process by automating the resume screening process. The proposed system uses NLP techniques to extract the relevant competencies from resumes, focusing on the key skills required for specific positions. The competency sets taken for the positions were used. A case study was conducted for 123 job positions. The extracted competencies are matched to predefined skill sets associated with various job positions using Jaccard Similarity. This method provides a similarity score that helps rank candidates by comparing the presence or absence of words in the candidate's resume to the required competencies. This NLP-based system offers significant benefits such as saving time and resources, increasing accuracy in candidate selection, and reducing bias by focusing only on competencies. The system's integration with LinkedIn increases its usefulness by allowing seamless import and analysis of resumes. Overall, this study demonstrates the transformative potential of NLP in optimizing the resume screening process by providing a scalable, efficient, and unbiased solution for large organizations.

Cimind: A phonetic-based tool for multilingual named entity recognition in biomedical texts.

E-voting is one of the most important components of e-democracy and includes interesting research topics, such as the mechanisms of participation in elections, technological solutions to e-voting and the efficient application of those in e-voting. Currently, there are numerous voting systems adopted in many countries of the world and each of those has specific advantages and problems. The paper explores the e-voting system as one of the main tools of e-democracy and analyzes its advantages and drawbacks. Voting results always lead to a broad debate in terms of candidate selection and of whether the candidate elected to a position is suitable for that position. At present, the selection of qualified personnel and their appointment to responsible positions in public administration is one of the topical issues. In the paper, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) is proposed for the selection of candidates in e-voting. The criteria for candidate selection are determined and the relationship of each candidate with the other candidates is assessed by using a binary matrix. The candidate rank is calculated according to all the criteria. In a numerical experiment, candidate evaluation is enabled based on the selected criteria and ranked by using a positional ranking approach. The proposed model allows for the selection of a candidate with the competencies based on the criteria set out in the e-voting process and the making of more effective decisions as well.

The article discusses the role of the personal characteristics of candi- dates in municipal elections as important factors infl uencing the candidates' election success. Voters lacking suffi cient or relevant information about the candidates and their political preferences can use knowledge of the candi- dates' personal characteristics as specifi c cues or shortcuts in their choice. On the other hand, the candidates' personal characteristics are the private resources they can use to infl uence the chance to getting elected. The article uses a logistic regression to analyse the impact of candidates' personal char- acteristics on their electoral success in Czech municipal elections. A list of all candidates in the elections was used, including information about their so- ciodemographic and political characteristics and their election results. First examined is how a candidate's ranking on the list of candidates can depend on his or her personal characteristics. Second, how a candidate's election suc- cess can depend on his or her position on the list of candidates and on his or her personal characteristics is analysed. The list of candidates for the 2010 elections was combined with lists of candidates for several previous elections in order to investigate the infl uence of incumbency. The results suggest that incumbency is the dominant independent factor explaining the election suc- cess of individual candidates, yet other characteristics, such as sex, education, age or membership in political parties are important as well. In small munici- palities, the situation differs in some aspects from that in cities.

Previous research has developed a representation for the Condorcet efficiency of plurality and negative plurality rules on three candidates for large electorates under the impartial culture condition. This study considers the two stage voting rules on three candidates, plurality elimination and negative plurality elimination. A representation is obtained for the Condorcet efficiency of each for large electorates under impartial culture. The Condorcet efficiencies of both rules are equal and are shown to be substantially greater than the Condorcet efficiency of plurality and negative plurality.

Election databases are the main elements of a recently introduced framework that aims to create bridges between the computational social choice and the data management communities. An election database consists of incomplete information about the preferences of voters, in the form of partial orders, alongside with standard database relations that provide contextual information. Earlier work in computational social choice focused on the computation of possible winners and necessary winners that are determined by the available incomplete information and the voting rule at hand. The presence of the relational context, however, permits the formulation of sophisticated queries about voting rules, candidates, potential winners, issues, and positions on issues. Such queries can be given possible answer semantics and necessary answer semantics on an election database, where the former means that the query is true on some completion of the given partial orders and the latter means that the query is true on every such completion. %In this paper, łooseness = -1 We carry out a systematic investigation of query evaluation on election databases by analyzing how the interaction between the partial preferences, the voting rules and the relational context impacts on the complexity of query evaluation. To this effect, we focus on positional scoring rules and unions of conjunctive queries. We establish a number of results that delineate the complexity of the possible answers and of the necessary answers for different positional scoring rules and for various classes of unions of conjunctive queries. Furthermore, we show that query evaluation is fixed-parameter tractable, where the parameter is the number of candidates in the election.

Standard voting rules usually assume that the preferences of voters are provided in the form of complete rankings over a fixed set of alternatives. This assumption does not hold in applications like recommendation systems where the set of alternatives is extremely large and only partial preferences can be elicited. In this paper, we study the problem of strategic manipulation of voting rules that aggregate voter preferences provided in the form of pairwise comparisons between alternatives. Our contributions are twofold: first, we show that any onto pairwise voting rule is manipulable in principle. Next, we analyze how the computational complexity of manipulation of such rules varies with the structure of the graph induced by the pairs of alternatives that the manipulator is allowed to vote over and the type of the preference relation. Building on natural connections between the pairwise manipulation and sports elimination problems (including a mixed-elimination variant that we introduce in this paper), we show that manipulating pairwise voting rules can be computationally hard even in the single-manipulator setting, a setting where most standard voting rules are known to be easy to manipulate.