DFG-Project: Distances in Voting
The project “Distances in Elections” has been funded by the DFG since 2017 and was completed in 2022. The aim of the project was to systematically investigate ‘Distances in Elections’. As part of the project, which is based in theoretical computer science and funded with a total of 285,000 euros (two-year funding period), distances in elections were to be investigated in three respects. Firstly, distances in elections of individual candidates were investigated.
Secondly, distances in committee elections were examined. One of the issues here was whether and to what extent election rules based on distances in single-candidate elections can also be extended to committee elections. Finally, thirdly, it looked at various forms of influence peddling in elections, both those that elect a single candidate and committee elections. One focus here was on bribery and manipulation.
Elections play a central role in very different areas. On the one hand in political elections and other voting processes, but also increasingly in the field of artificial intelligence, where algorithms automatically choose between a large number of options. We are already encountering these mechanisms today, for example in automatic recommendation systems that recommend products based on online purchases that are as close as possible to the buyer's preference. However, the increasing use of the internet means that these processes will also become relevant for online voting processes in the future.
The project was led by Dorothea Baumeister. She has been a junior professor of theoretical computer science (specializing in computational social choice) at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf since 2013. In her research, she focuses on axiomatic and complexity-theoretic analysis in the areas of preference aggregation, joint judgment and distributional problems.