The River Voting Method

Recently, the River Method was introduced as novel refinement of the Split Cycle voting rule. The decision-making process of River is closely related to the well established Ranked Pairs Method. Both methods consider a margin graph computed from the voters' preferences and eliminate majority cycles in that graph to choose a winner. As ties can occur in the margin graph, a tiebreaker is required along with the preferences. While such a tiebreaker makes the computation efficient, it compromises the fundamental property of neutrality: the voting rule should not favor alternatives in advance. One way to reintroduce neutrality is to use Parallel-Universe Tiebreaking (PUT), where each alternative is a winner if it wins according to any possible tiebreaker. Unfortunately, computing the winners selected by Ranked Pairs with PUT is NP-complete. Given the similarity of River to Ranked Pairs, one might expect River to suffer from the same complexity. Surprisingly, we show the opposite: We present a polynomial-time algorithm for computing River winners with PUT, highlighting significant structural advantages of River over Ranked Pairs. Our Fused-Universe (FUN) algorithm simulates River for every possible tiebreaking in one pass. From the resulting FUN diagram one can then directly read off both the set of winners and, for each winner, a certificate that explains how this alternative dominates the others.

The article examines the anatomy of the Russian linguistic colonialism in 19th-century Georgia and the nature, scale, and consequences of its influence on the functioning of the Georgian language. It analyzes the measures taken by Georgian figures of this period to raise the social status of the native language in the face of the challenges of Russian colonialism. It shows how in the changed socio-political situation as a result of the annexation of Georgia, they turned the standardization and codification of the language into one of the strong forms of resistance, with which they opposed the at-tempts of linguistic assimilation coming from the Tsarist government. The article sheds light on the fact that a correct vision of the advanced intelligentsia on language poli-cy and an adequate assessment of the dangers of colonialism often save the colonized languages from being swept away by the dominant language and from extinction. Their consideration of language as one of the main markers of national identity, on the one hand, and the perception of linguistic colonialism as a manifestation of Rus-sian cultural hegemony, the real goal of which was to introduce the imperial cultural norms, values, and ideologies in the colonized country, played an important role in improving the ecological environment of the Georgian language, overcoming the difficulties of the linguistic hierarchy. and, finally, to preserve the national identity.