Started in 2017, the aim of this project is the systematic study of distances in voting. The computer science project is being funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) for a period of two years (overall budget of 285.000 Euro). Distances play a central role in different fields of voting. They are for example used to define voting systems, to study different forms of interference, and in the rationalization of voting rules.
In this project we will study distances in voting in three different tasks. In the first task we consider distances in single-winner elections. We start by consider-
ing properties of different distance measures when applied to voting rules, and study the role of distances in the axiomatic study of voting rules. In the second task we will focus on distances in committee elections. Here we want to investigate how single-winner voting systems based on distances can be transferred to committee elections together with an axiomatic study of such rules. One property that we want to investigate in more detail is justified representation. In the last task we consider distances in different forms of interference in single-winner and in committee elections. Here a special emphasis will be on bribery and manipulation. The whole project will provide an axiomatic and computational study of the described problems.
Contact
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Dorothea Baumeister
Computer Science
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Dorothea Baumeister is junior professor for theoretical computer science at HHU-Düsseldorf since September 2013. Since 2017, she is head of the DFG project “Distances in Elections”. In her research, she focuses on axiomatic and complexity-theoretic analysis of the fields of preference aggregation, voting systems, and distributional problems.
At DIID, she is particularly interested in the formal modeling of online participation processes and the influence of distances in online election processes.