Abstract Presidential elections can be forecast using information from political and economic conditions, polls, and a statistical model of changes in public opinion over time. However, these “knowns” about how to make a good presidential election forecast come with many unknowns due to the challenges of evaluating forecast calibration and communication. We highlight how incentives may shape forecasts, and particularly forecast uncertainty, in light of calibration challenges. We illustrate these challenges in creating, communicating, and evaluating election predictions, using the Economist and Fivethirtyeight forecasts of the 2020 election as examples, and offer recommendations for forecasters and scholars.
more »
« less
Assessing Candidate Preference through Web Browsing History
Predicting election outcomes is of considerable interest to candidates, political scientists, and the public at large. We propose the use of Web browsing history as a new indicator of candidate preference among the electorate, one that has potential to overcome a number of the drawbacks of election polls. However, there are a number of challenges that must be overcome to effectively use Web browsing for assessing candidate preference—including the lack of suitable ground truth data and the heterogeneity of user populations in time and space. We address these challenges, and show that the resulting methods can shed considerable light on the dynamics of voters’ candidate preferences in ways that are difficult
to achieve using polls.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1703592
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10096153
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 158 to 167
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
null (Ed.)A boardroom election is an election with a small number of voters carried out with public communications. We present BVOT, a self-tallying boardroom voting protocol with ballot secrecy, fairness (no tally information is available before the polls close), and dispute-freeness (voters can observe that all voters correctly followed the protocol). BVOT works by using a multiparty threshold homomorphic encryption system in which each candidate is associated with a set of masked primes. Each voter engages in an oblivious transfer with an untrusted distributor: the voter selects the index of a prime associated with a candidate and receives the selected prime in masked form. The voter then casts their vote by encrypting their masked prime and broadcasting it to everyone. The distributor does not learn the voter's choice, and no one learns the mapping between primes and candidates until the audit phase. By hiding the mapping between primes and candidates, BVOT provides voters with insufficient information to carry out effective cheating. The threshold feature prevents anyone from computing any partial tally---until everyone has voted. Multiplying all votes, their decryption shares, and the unmasking factor yields a product of the primes each raised to the number of votes received. In contrast to some existing boardroom voting protocols, BVOT does not rely on any zero-knowledge proof; instead, it uses oblivious transfer to assure ballot secrecy and correct vote casting. Also, BVOT can handle multiple candidates in one election. BVOT prevents cheating by hiding crucial information: an attempt to increase the tally of one candidate might increase the tally of another candidate. After all votes are cast, any party can tally the votes.more » « less
-
Abstract Traditionally, election polls have asked for participants’ own voting intentions. In four elections, we previously found that we could improve predictions by asking participants how they thought their social circles would vote. A potential concern is that the social-circle question might predict results less well in elections with larger numbers of political options because it becomes harder to accurately track how social contacts plan to vote. However, we now find that the social-circle question performs better than the own-intention question in predicting two elections with many political parties: The Netherlands’ 2017 general election and the Swedish 2018 general election.more » « less
-
A large fraction of users in developing regions use relatively inexpensive, low-end smartphones. However, the impact of device capabilities on the performance of mobile Internet applications has not been explored. To bridge this gap, we study the QoE of three popular applications -- Web browsing, video streaming, and video telephony -- for different device parameters. Our results demonstrate that the performance of Web browsing is much more sensitive to low-end hardware than that of video applications, especially video streaming. This is because the video applications exploit specialized coprocessors/accelerators and thread-level parallelism on multi-core mobile devices. Even low-end devices are equipped with needed coprocessors and multiple cores. In contrast, Web browsing is largely influenced by clock frequency, but it uses no more than two cores. This makes the performance of Web browsing more vulnerable on low-end smartphones. Based on the lessons learned from studying video applications, we explore offloading Web computation to a coprocessor. Specifically, we explore the offloading of regular expression computation to a DSP coprocessor and show an improvement of 18% in page load time while saving energy by a factor of four.more » « less
-
Classical leader election protocols typically assume complete and correct knowledge of underlying membership lists at all participating nodes. Yet many edge and IoT settings are dynamic, with nodes joining, leaving, and failing continuously—a phenomenon called churn. This implies that in any membership protocol, a given node’s membership list may have entries that are missing (e.g., false positive detections, or newly joined nodes whose information has not spread yet) or stale (e.g., failed nodes that are undetected)—these would render classical election protocols incorrect. We present a family of four leader election protocols that are churn-tolerant (or c-tolerant). The key ideas are to: i) involve the minimum number of nodes necessary to achieve safety; ii) use optimism so that decisions are made faster when churn is low; iii) incorporate a preference for electing healthier nodes as leaders. We prove the correctness and safety of our c-tolerant protocols and show their message complexity is optimal. We present experimental results from both a trace- driven simulation as well as our implementation atop Raspberry Pi devices, including a comparison against Zookeeper.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3219819.3219884
