Tootfinder

Democracy on the March... into the abyss...
In today's news, a rather small fish in the world of voting systems swallows a whale.
This reporter wonders: Who provided the funding for this acquisition?
"Scoop: Dominion Voting sold to company run by ex-GOP election official"
htt…

Scoop: Dominion Voting sold to company run by ex-GOP election official
Dominion is one of the biggest election equipment providers and was used by 27 states during the 2024 election.

⏰ The new engine of voting: Out-party hostility outpaces in-party loyalty across established democracies
https://phys.org/news/2025-09-voting-party-hostility-outpaces-loyalty.html

The new engine of voting: Out-party hostility outpaces in-party loyalty across established democracies
A new study led by Professor Diego Garzia of the University of Lausanne, published in Public Opinion Quarterly, reveals a major shift in electoral motivation. In many Western democracies, voters are now more driven by opposition to their political adversaries than by support for their own side. This phenomenon marks a move away from ideological disagreement toward an emotionally charged dynamic rooted in rejection and hostility, an evolution that may ultimately weaken the very foundations of de…

If Republicans succeed in pulling off an aggressively partisan gerrymander of congressional districts in Texas,
they will owe the Supreme Court a debt of gratitude.
In the two decades Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has led the Supreme Court,
And the justices have reshaped American elections not just by letting state lawmakers like those in Texas draw voting maps warped by politics,
but also by gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and amplifying the role of money in…

In Election Cases, Supreme Court Keeps Removing Guardrails
The justices, having effectively blessed partisan gerrymandering, may be poised to eliminate the remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act.

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

Former GOP election official buys Dominion Voting Systems, says he’ll push for paper ballots
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/09/politics/dominion-voting-systems-bought-election-ballots

Former GOP election official buys Dominion Voting Systems, says he’ll push for paper ballots
Dominion Voting Systems, the election vendor that was falsely accused of rigging the 2020 election, is being sold and rebranded as Liberty Vote effective immediately.

Not in My Backyard! Temporal Voting Over Public Chores
Edith Elkind, Tzeh Yuan Neoh, Nicholas Teh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08810 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

Not in My Backyard! Temporal Voting Over Public Chores
We study a temporal voting model where voters have dynamic preferences over a set of public chores -- projects that benefit society, but impose individual costs on those affected by their implementation. We investigate the computational complexity of optimizing utilitarian and egalitarian welfare. Our results show that while optimizing the former is computationally straightforward, minimizing the latter is computationally intractable, even in very restricted cases. Nevertheless, we identify sev…

Secure and Scalable Blockchain Voting: A Comparative Framework and the Role of Large Language Models
Kiana Kiashemshaki, Elvis Nnaemeka Chukwuani, Mohammad Jalili Torkamani, Negin Mahmoudi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05865

Secure and Scalable Blockchain Voting: A Comparative Framework and the Role of Large Language Models
Blockchain technology offers a promising foundation for modernizing E-Voting systems by enhancing transparency, decentralization, and security. Yet, real-world adoption remains limited due to persistent challenges such as scalability constraints, high computational demands, and complex privacy requirements. This paper presents a comparative framework for analyzing blockchain-based E-Voting architectures, consensus mechanisms, and cryptographic protocols. We examine the limitations of prevalent …

Anonymous voting in a heterogeneous society
Yaron Azrieli, Ritesh Jain, Semin Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08055 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08055

Anonymous voting in a heterogeneous society
We study the design of voting mechanisms in a binary social choice environment where agents' cardinal valuations are independent but not necessarily identically distributed. The mechanism must be anonymous -- the outcome is invariant to permutations of the reported values. We show that if there are two agents then expected welfare is always maximized by an ordinal majority rule, but with three or more agents there are environments in which cardinal mechanisms that take into account preference i…

Für den Publikumspreis des #GrimmeOnlineAward2025 könnt ihr mit bis zu drei Stimmen für sehr viele sehr tolle Projekte abstimmen. Darunter ist #Mastodon stellvertretend für das Fediverse, der #RealOMat

Penn State University plans to "wind down" public media station WPSU by June 2026 after a university board declined to transfer ownership to Philadelphia's WHYY (Carmen Russell-Sluchansky/WHYY)
https://whyy.org/articles/penn-state-wpsu-whyy/

Penn State to wind down WPSU after board of trustees declines transfer to WHYY
In voting down a proposal to transfer the station to WHYY, trustees expressed concern over a $17 million subsidy and wanted a commitment to hire staff.

I told y'all Asians were next. All you anti-tax, Trump-voting Asians can enjoy having MAGA's racist gunsights aimed at us now.
Way to go, dumbasses.
Original post: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:i3fhjvvkbmirhyu4aeihhrnv/post/3lynbesxxsm2k…

Dem Governor Nails Trump On Redistricting: He Cheats On Wives, Golf, And Voting (David Edwards/Crooks and Liars)
https://crooksandliars.com/2025/08/dem-governor-nails-trump-redistricting-he
http://www.memeorandum.com/250811/p33#a250811p33

wiki_rfa: Wikipedia RfA voting network (2013)
The set of all votes on Requests for Adminships (RfA), from 2003 to May 2013, represented as a directed, signed network in which nodes represent Wikipedia members and edges represent votes.
This network has 11381 nodes and 198275 edges.
Tags: Social, Relationships, Signed
https://

The Trump administration wants the last four digits of every voter’s Social Security number
—as part of its sweeping efforts to compile a federal voting database
The administration could use the database to investigate claims of noncitizen voting,
an obsession of Trump and other Republicans who claimed the 2020 election had been stolen through massive voter fraud.
In reality, the only ones concocting a scheme to fake votes in that election were in Donald Trump’s camp.

In Disturbing Move, Trump’s DOJ Demands Voting Data From States
It’s part of a sweeping project led by election deniers. Voting rights advocates are alarmed.

It is a strange kind of irony to grow up with divorced parents and discover that the two sides of my family could not be more different. My mom is voting for fascists, and it shows in the way she tries to dictate every part of me, how I should look, how my hair should be, and the choices I never wanted to make but was pushed toward. Her world feels like control, a constant pressure to fit into something I do not belong to.
My dad, on the other hand, is voting for socialists, but more t…

Secret ballots no more.
According to The New Republic:
In Disturbing Move, Trump’s DOJ Demands Voting Data From States;
It’s part of a sweeping project led by election deniers. Voting rights advocates are alarmed.
https://newrepublic.com/post/200204/do

In Disturbing Move, Trump’s DOJ Demands Voting Data From States
It’s part of a sweeping project led by election deniers. Voting rights advocates are alarmed.

If you're a Californian, please contact your senator and ask him to vote yes on AB 1264 to remove ultra-processed "food" from school lunches. These products have many adverse health impacts.
This link makes it easy to write your senator: https://action…

California: Tell Your State Senator to Get Dangerous, Ultra-Processed Food Out of School Lunches
This bill has already passed the Senate Health Committee unanimously, but manufacturers are pushing back hard against this bill, and the Senate will be voting soon to decide its fate.

If you're a Californian, please contact your senator and ask him to vote yes on AB 1264 to remove ultra-processed "food" from school lunches. These products have many adverse health impacts.
This link makes it easy to write your senator: https://action…

California: Tell Your State Senator to Get Dangerous, Ultra-Processed Food Out of School Lunches
This bill has already passed the Senate Health Committee unanimously, but manufacturers are pushing back hard against this bill, and the Senate will be voting soon to decide its fate.

How the US democracy is designed to avoid representation
Right now in the US, a system which proclaims to give each citizen representation, my interests are not represented very well by most of my so-called representatives at any level of government. This is true for a majority of Americans across the political spectrum, and it happens by design. The "founding fathers" were explicit about wanting a system of government that would appear Democratic but which would keep power in the hands of rich white landowners, and they successfully designed exactly that. But how does disenfranchisement work in this system?
First, a two-party system locked in by first-post-the-post winner-takes-all elections immediately destroys representation for everyone who didn't vote for the winner, including those who didn't vote or weren't eligible to vote. Single-day non-holiday elections and prisoner disenfranchisement go a long way towards ensuring working-class people get no say, but much larger is the winner-takes all system. In fact, even people who vote for the winning candidate don't get effective representation if they're really just voting against the opponent as the greater of two evils. In a 51/49 election with 50% turnout, you've immediately ensured that ~75% of eligible voters don't get represented, and with lesser-of-two-evils voting, you create an even wider gap to wedge corporate interests into. Politicians need money to saturate their lesser-of-two-evils message far more than they need to convince any individual voter to support their policies. It's even okay if they get caught lying, cheating, or worse (cough Epstein cough) as long as the other side is also doing those things and you can freeze out new parties.
Second, by design the Senate ensures uneven representation, allowing control of the least-populous half of states to control or at least shut down the legislative process. A rough count suggests 284.6 million live in the 25 most-populous states, while only 54.8 million live in the rest. Currently, counting states with divided representation as two half-states with half as much population, 157.8 million people are represented by 53 Republican sensors, while 180.5 million people get only 45 seats of Democratic representation. This isn't an anti-Democrat bias, it's a bias towards less-populous states, whose residents get more than their share it political power.
I haven't even talked about gerrymandering yet, or family/faith-based "party loyalty," etc. Overall, the effect is that the number of people whose elected representatives meaningfully represent their interests on any given issue is vanishingly small (like, 10% of people tops), unless you happen to be rich enough to purchase lobbying power or direct access.
If we look at polls, we can see how lack of representation lets congress & the president enact many policies that go against what a majority of the population wants. Things like abortion restrictions, the current ICE raids, and Medicare cuts are deeply unpopular, but they benefit the political class and those who can buy access. These are possible because the system ensures at every step of the way that ordinary people do NOT get the one thing the system promises them: representation in the halls of power.
Okay, but is this a feature of all democracies, inherent in the nature of a majority-decides system? Not exactly...
1/2
#uspol #democracy

Time Is a Feature: Exploiting Temporal Dynamics in Diffusion Language Models
Wen Wang, Bozhen Fang, Chenchen Jing, Yongliang Shen, Yangyi Shen, Qiuyu Wang, Hao Ouyang, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09138

Time Is a Feature: Exploiting Temporal Dynamics in Diffusion Language Models
Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) generate text through iterative denoising, yet current decoding strategies discard rich intermediate predictions in favor of the final output. Our work here reveals a critical phenomenon, temporal oscillation, where correct answers often emerge in the middle process, but are overwritten in later denoising steps. To address this issue, we introduce two complementary methods that exploit temporal consistency: 1) Temporal Self-Consistency Voting, a training-…

Last month, Republicans passed a reconciliation bill that is expected to kick millions of Americans off of Medicaid and other forms of health insurance.
The legislation includes over $800 million in cuts to Medicaid spending over the next 10 years,
the largest in the program’s history.
Now, as Republicans gear up for next year’s midterm elections,
vulnerable lawmakers who supported the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”
are attempting to recast themselves as prote…

Vulnerable Republicans Are Claiming They Love Medicaid After Voting to Gut It
Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Tom Kean Jr., and Gabe Evans introduced a resolution supporting Medicaid after voting for cuts to the program. 

'Not a good year': Trump-voting farmers reaching 'limits of the their patience' with his policies - Alternet.org
https://www.alternet.org/trump-farmers-policies/

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.DC. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.DC/new
[1/1]:
- Are Voters Willing to Collectively Secure Elections? Unraveling a Practical Blockchain Voting System
Li, Sonmezler, Shirazi, Shaji, Mroczkowski, Lardner, Camus, Pournaras

No Epstein files coming.
Thanks GOP for protecting your pedo-idol & voting against justice during the Charlie Kirk distraction.
Original post: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:lamzlaxo4gvxvz65vsbrhvty/post/3lymbfa5du22l

Scoop: Dominion Voting sold to company run by ex-GOP election official (Alex Isenstadt/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/09/dominion-voting-machines-sold-elections
http://www.memeorandum.com/251009/p76#a251009p76

Optimizing Districting Plans to Maximize Majority-Minority Districts via IPs and Local Search
Daniel Brous, David Shmoys
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07446 https://

Optimizing Districting Plans to Maximize Majority-Minority Districts via IPs and Local Search
In redistricting litigation, effective enforcement of the Voting Rights Act has often involved providing the court with districting plans that display a larger number of majority-minority districts than the current proposal (as was true, for example, in what followed Allen v. Milligan concerning the congressional districting plan for Alabama in 2023). Recent work by Cannon et al. proposed a heuristic algorithm for generating plans to optimize majority-minority districts, which they called short…

Hey Chicago! Like pizza? Like fair elections? If either of those apply, this is for you:
https://www.citybureau.org/events/the-great-chicago-pizza-election-an-exercise-in-ranked-choice-voting

The Great Chicago Pizza Election: An Exercise in Ranked Choice Voting — City Bureau
Nominate the local pizzeria you think epitomizes what Chicago pizza is all about — tavern-style, thick crust, deep dish, it’s up to you — and we’ll have the top 5 nominees available for you to taste and rank.

I’m checking in with Better Ballot Georgia to see what I can do to promote Ranked Choice Voting in GA. Care to join me? 9/17 19:00-20:00 via Zoom
https://www.betterballotgeorgia.org/bbga_statewide_20250917?recruiter_id=95824

I had not noticed this until someone sent me a pointer...
"Justice Department requests access to Dominion voting equipment used in Missouri in 2020"
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/04/politics/doj-voting-equipment-states

Justice Department requests access to Dominion voting equipment used in Missouri in 2020
The US Department of Justice has requested access to voting equipment used in the 2020 election in two Missouri counties in what appears to be a wide-ranging effort to more closely monitor election processes around the country.

Voting-Based Semi-Parallel Proof-of-Work Protocol
Mustafa Doger, Sennur Ulukus
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06489 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06489

Voting-Based Semi-Parallel Proof-of-Work Protocol
Parallel Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocols are suggested to improve the safety guarantees, transaction throughput and confirmation latencies of Nakamoto consensus. In this work, we first consider the existing parallel PoW protocols and develop hard-coded incentive attack structures. Our theoretical results and simulations show that the existing parallel PoW protocols are more vulnerable to incentive attacks than the Nakamoto consensus, e.g., attacks have smaller profitability threshold and they res…

Replaced article(s) found for cs.MA. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.MA/new
[1/1]:
- DeepVoting: Learning and Fine-Tuning Voting Rules with Canonical Embeddings
Leonardo Matone, Ben Abramowitz, Ben Armstrong, Avinash Balakrishnan, Nicholas Mattei

wiki_rfa: Wikipedia RfA voting network (2013)
The set of all votes on Requests for Adminships (RfA), from 2003 to May 2013, represented as a directed, signed network in which nodes represent Wikipedia members and edges represent votes.
This network has 11381 nodes and 198275 edges.
Tags: Social, Relationships, Signed
https://

93% of submissions to the BC Democratic and Electoral Reform Committee committee called for proportional representation.
This summer, the committee conducted public hearings across the province, inviting presentations and written submissions from individuals and groups.
Of the 865 presentations or submissions that included an opinion on the voting system, 93% advocated for proportional representation. Only 2% advocated for first-past-the-post.

BC Electoral Reform Committee: 93% support for proportional representation in public consultation
93% of those who participated in the public consultation of the BC Electoral Reform Committee with an opinion on the voting system recommended proportional representation.

In Election Cases, Supreme Court Keeps Removing Guardrails (Adam Liptak/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/us/supreme-court-voting-redistricting.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/250810/p14#a250810p14

#news

BAFTA changes its rules to let all 6,000 members vote in the international TV category; the 2026 TV awards are set for May 10, and the craft awards for April 26 (Max Goldbart/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2025/08/bafta-voting-rules-internat…

BAFTA Tweaks Voting Rules For International TV Category & Reveals 2026 Awards Dates
BAFTA has unveiled the dates for the 2026 TV Awards and tweaked the international voting category.

DoJ says voting machine maker funneled LA county money into slush funds used to pay bribes
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/20/smartmatic-voting-machines-bribery

Two-Stage Voting for Robust and Efficient Suicide Risk Detection on Social Media
Yukai Song, Pengfei Zhou, C\'esar Escobar-Viera, Candice Biernesser, Wei Huang, Jingtong Hu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08365

Two-Stage Voting for Robust and Efficient Suicide Risk Detection on Social Media
Suicide rates have risen worldwide in recent years, underscoring the urgent need for proactive prevention strategies. Social media provides valuable signals, as many at-risk individuals - who often avoid formal help due to stigma - choose instead to share their distress online. Yet detecting implicit suicidal ideation, conveyed indirectly through metaphor, sarcasm, or subtle emotional cues, remains highly challenging. Lightweight models like BERT handle explicit signals but fail on subtle impli…

Trump-voting farmers beg for government handout
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/9/6/2341991/-Trump-voting-farmers-beg-for-government-handout

📢 Der #DigAMus Award 2025 geht in die nächste Phase
und wir brauchen eure Meinung! Stimmt ab für die besten digitalen Museumsprojekte aus der Longlist 2025:
https://digamus-award.de/voting/

Trump preparing for the 2026 midterms. He'll do everything to prevent reasonably free and fair elections.
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/21/trump-redistricting-republican-100-seats-mail-voting

Trump lays out his redistricting endgame: A 100-seat Republican majority
"STOP MAIL-IN VOTING, a total fraud that has no bounds," Trump said.

Collective contributions to polarization in political voting
Gavin Rees, Edward D. Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02496 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02496

Collective contributions to polarization in political voting
Politics around the world exhibits increasing polarization, demonstrated in part by rigid voting configurations in legislatures. The crux of polarization is separation along a unidimensional ideological axis, but how it emerges is yet partially understood. We refine a powerful class of models from statistical physics, restricted Boltzmann machines, to unify two classes of individual voter preference and voter interaction models. Our model is minimally parameterized, fits voting data well, and h…

Hergehört! Hier könnt ihr bis zum 1. Oktober #Mastodon eure Stimme beim #GrimmeOnlineAward-Publikumspreis geben: https://www.grimme-on…

Whelp, just spent the last few hours reviewing candidates for our boys' school board, and voting, and then did the same to prepare for the upcoming local elections... which, of course, shows how little one can really glean about a candiate's character from 2 minute videos... will have to investigate further: they mostly talk a good game, but it's hard to know how consequential they have been in past roles and are likely to be now. I fear few folks will make the time to do their d…

Martial Arts have always been a part of #StarTrek. But we have come quite a bit since the famous hand chop, as we can see with the subject of today's #TrekTriviaTuesday question.
As always no googling and no spoiling the answer for others. Please boost after voting! :BoostOK:
V…

Best-of-Majority: Minimax-Optimal Strategy for Pass@$k$ Inference Scaling
Qiwei Di, Kaixuan Ji, Xuheng Li, Heyang Zhao, Quanquan Gu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03199 https://

Best-of-Majority: Minimax-Optimal Strategy for Pass@$k$ Inference Scaling
LLM inference often generates a batch of candidates for a prompt and selects one via strategies like majority voting or Best-of- N (BoN). For difficult tasks, this single-shot selection often underperforms. Consequently, evaluations commonly report Pass@$k$: the agent may submit up to $k$ responses, and only the best of them is used when computing regret. Motivated by this, we study inference scaling in the more general Pass@$k$ inference setting, and prove that neither majority voting nor BoN …

Real Preferences Under Arbitrary Norms
Joshua Zeitlin, Corinna Coupette
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09046 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09046

Real Preferences Under Arbitrary Norms
Whether the goal is to analyze voting behavior, locate facilities, or recommend products, the problem of translating between (ordinal) rankings and (numerical) utilities arises naturally in many contexts. This task is commonly approached by representing both the individuals doing the ranking (voters) and the items to be ranked (alternatives) in a shared metric space, where ordinal preferences are translated into relationships between pairwise distances. Prior work has established that any colle…

Es hilft nicht, die monopolistischen Giganten als Individuum zu boykottieren, es hilft aber, selbst alternative Strukturen zu unterstützen. So schreibt @… sehr prägnant:
> Make consumption choices that improve your life and the lives of people you love. Support your local bookstore, buy online from libro.fm and bookshop.org – not because this will brea…

Supreme Court, in Order Asking for Additional Briefing in Louisiana Voting Case,
🔥Appears to Put the Constitutionality of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act into Question
https://electionlawblog.org/?p=151301

Breaking: Supreme Court, in Order Asking for Additional Briefing in Louisiana Voting Case, Appears to Put the Constitutionality of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act into Question #ELB
The Supreme Court just issued this order: Louisiana had to create that second majority-minority district in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act, as it had been found to face Section 2 VRA liability for not creating that district. … Continue reading Breaking: Supreme Court, in Order Asking for Additional Briefing in Louisiana Voting Case, Appears to Put the Constitutionality of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act into Question →

From Detection to Mitigation: Addressing Gender Bias in Chinese Texts via Efficient Tuning and Voting-Based Rebalancing
Chengyan Wu, Yiqiang Cai, Yufei Cheng, Yun Xue
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07889

From Detection to Mitigation: Addressing Gender Bias in Chinese Texts via Efficient Tuning and Voting-Based Rebalancing
This paper presents our team's solution to Shared Task 7 of NLPCC-2025, which focuses on sentence-level gender bias detection and mitigation in Chinese. The task aims to promote fairness and controllability in natural language generation by automatically detecting, classifying, and mitigating gender bias. To address this challenge, we adopt a fine-tuning approach based on large language models (LLMs), efficiently adapt to the bias detection task via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). In terms of data …

Proportional Representation Is the Solution to Gerrymandering
https://jacobin.com/2025/09/proportional-representation-voting-democrats-gerrymandering/

Pete Hegseth reposts video that says women shouldn't be allowed to vote (Coral Murphy Marcos/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/09/pete-hegseth-video-pastors-women-voting
http://www.memeorandum.com/250810/p3#a250810p3

Just voted for the first time as an overseas voter. Kudos to Colorado for making it super simple and possibly easier than the already-easy mail-in voting!

#uspol #vote #colorado

Phase transitions in voting simulated by an intelligent Ising model
Guanyu Xu, Jiahang Chen, Xin Zhou, Yanting Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19161 https://

Phase transitions in voting simulated by an intelligent Ising model
Voting is an important social activity for expressing public opinions. By conceptually considering a group of voting agents to be intelligent matter, the impact of real-time information on voting results is quantitatively studied by an intelligent Ising model, which is formed by adding nonlinear instantaneous feedback of the overall magnetization to the conventional Ising model. In the new model, the interaction strength becomes a variable depending on the total magnetization rather than a cons…

A Correct by Construction Fault Tolerant Voter for Input Selection of a Control System
Arif Ali AP, Jasine Babu, Deepa Sara John
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22236 https://…

A Correct by Construction Fault Tolerant Voter for Input Selection of a Control System
Safety-critical systems use redundant input units to improve their reliability and fault tolerance. A voting logic is then used to select a reliable input from the redundant sources. A fault detection and isolation rules help in selecting input units that can participate in voting. This work deals with the formal requirement formulation, design, verification and synthesis of a generic voting unit for an $N$-modular redundant measurement system used for control applications in avionics systems. …

Trump’s DOJ seeks election equipment in red state ahead of 2026 election
https://wapo.st/4mP2pfc

Trump’s DOJ seeks voting equipment in Missouri ahead of 2026 election
The unusual request for equipment used by two Republican clerks in the 2020 election comes after Trump said he would lead a movement to get rid of voting machines.

FCC filing: Larry Ellison will hold a minority voting interest of ~35.5% in the combined Paramount-Skydance company, without any veto or special voting rights (Lucas Manfredi/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/larry-ellison-paramount-skydance-merger-voting-right…

Larry Ellison to Hold 35.5% of Family's Voting Rights in New Paramount, National Amusements After Skydance Merger Closes
The Oracle chairman will not have any "veto rights, or any special or outsized voting rights," per an amendment filed with the FCC

Fairness in Token Delegation: Mitigating Voting Power Concentration in DAOs
Johnnatan Messias, Ayae Ide
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05830 https://arxiv.org/…

Fairness in Token Delegation: Mitigating Voting Power Concentration in DAOs
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) aim to enable participatory governance, but in practice face challenges of voter apathy, concentration of voting power, and misaligned delegation. Existing delegation mechanisms often reinforce visibility biases, where a small set of highly ranked delegates accumulate disproportionate influence regardless of their alignment with the broader community. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study of delegation in DAO governance, combining on-chain da…

Üble Nachrede: Wahlmaschinenhersteller erhält Millionen von US-Kabelsender
Dominion Voting Systems erhält 67 Millionen Dollar von Newsmax wegen übler Nachrede. Der US-Präsident möchte Wahlmaschinen und Briefwahl verbieten.

Trump’s DOJ seeks voting equipment in Missouri ahead of 2026 election

A top official in Trump’s Justice Department recently sought access to voting equipment used by two Republican clerks in Missouri during the 2020 election
-- an unusual request from federal officials amid continued efforts by the president to malign the integrity of the nation’s voting systems.

Trump’s DOJ seeks voting equipment in Missouri ahead of 2026 election
The unusual request for equipment used by two Republican clerks in the 2020 election comes after Trump said he would lead a movement to get rid of voting machines.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@TCatInReality/115317306795824403
How did ordinary people become so stupid that they started voting for the rich?
We used to see rich people as parasitic bloodsuckers who lived off of exploiting the labour of others.…

Pritzker: Donald Trump is a cheater. He cheats on his wives. He cheats at golf."
"And now he's trying to cheat the American people out of their votes."
Dem Governor Nails Trump On Redistricting: He Cheats On Wives, Golf, And Voting | Crooks and Liars
https://crooksandliars.com/2025/08/dem-governor-nails-trump-redistricting-he

wiki_rfa: Wikipedia RfA voting network (2013)
The set of all votes on Requests for Adminships (RfA), from 2003 to May 2013, represented as a directed, signed network in which nodes represent Wikipedia members and edges represent votes.
This network has 11381 nodes and 198275 edges.
Tags: Social, Relationships, Signed
https://

At 79, Dr. Jeffrey Bland hikes mountain ranges, surfs in the ocean, and sailed over 40,000 miles on his boat.
Dr. Jonny Bowden plays tennis two hours a day, hikes five days a week and conquered the Fight for Air Climb.
In this fireside chat, these two respected pioneers share science-backed secrets for living younger, longer.
As thriving examples of what’s possible through smart nutrition, functional medicine, and lifestyle design.
This conversation will explore h…

PanelPicker | SXSW Conference & Festivals
PanelPicker® is the official SXSW user-generated session proposal platform. Enter ideas and vote to help shape Conference programming for SXSW and SXSW EDU.

Replaced article(s) found for physics.soc-ph. https://arxiv.org/list/physics.soc-ph/new
[1/1]:
- Evaluating Fairness of Voting Systems: Simulating Violations of Arrow's Conditions
Virochan Pandit (The Johns Hopkins University), Joseph Cutrone (The Johns Hopkins Universi…

💢 How do drivers react to partisan bumper stickers? Understanding polarization in apolitical settings
#science

Frontiers | How do drivers react to partisan bumper stickers? Understanding polarization in apolitical settings
IntroductionThe impact of political polarization is no longer confined to the voting booth, and partisan identity can shape behavior even in seemingly apolit...

The Supreme Court Prepares to End Voting Rights As We Know It (Pema Levy/Mother Jones)
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/08/voting-rights-act-supreme-court-2/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250806/p1#a250806p1

If by American democracy we mean a pluralistic, multiracial society of political and social equals, then American democracy as we know it began with the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 60 years ago today.
Under the current Supreme Court’s vision of a rigidly colorblind Constitution
— indifferent to either racial inequality or the mechanisms of color caste
— the Voting Rights Act is very likely toast.
There is also the matter of Chief Justice John Roberts, wh…

Opinion | Donald Trump and John Roberts Have a Lot in Common
The Supreme Court may extinguish a law that more than any other made the promise of American democracy a reality.

Robust Voting Rules on the Interval Domain
Patrick Lederer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04874 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04874…

Robust Voting Rules on the Interval Domain
In this paper, we study voting rules on the interval domain, where the alternatives are arranged according to an externally given strict total order and voters report intervals of this order to indicate the alternatives they support. For this setting, we introduce and characterize the class of position-threshold rules, which compute a collective position of the voters with respect to every alternative and choose the left-most alternative whose collective position exceeds its threshold value. Ou…

Naming things isn't easy. Especially if you have to name as many ships and crafts as in #StarTrek. So lets see how good you are with names for today's #TrekTriviaTuesday question.
As always no googling and no spoiling the answer for others. Please boost after voting! :BoostOK:

Dominion Voting settles its lawsuit against OANN for defamation over 2020 election rigging claims (Jeremy Barr/@jeremymbarr)
https://x.com/jeremymbarr/status/1974233050373398656

Jeremy Barr (@jeremymbarr) on X
Another 2020 media lawsuit just got resolved: Dominion Voting Systems has ended their lawsuit against OAN

wiki_rfa: Wikipedia RfA voting network (2013)
The set of all votes on Requests for Adminships (RfA), from 2003 to May 2013, represented as a directed, signed network in which nodes represent Wikipedia members and edges represent votes.
This network has 11381 nodes and 198275 edges.
Tags: Social, Relationships, Signed
https://

Any lawyer who contributes to such a drafting effort should be quickly stripped of their license to practice law on the grounds that they have forgotten even the rudiments of our Constitutional system.
"Trump says lawyers are drafting executive order to end mail-in voting"
https://www…

Voting rights, privacy advocates sue to stop Trump administration’s ‘national data banks’ | News From The States
https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/voting-rights-privacy-advocates-sue-stop-trump-administrations-national-data-banks

Replaced article(s) found for cs.CL. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.CL/new
[3/6]:
- Advancing Scientific Text Classification: Fine-Tuned Models with Dataset Expansion and Hard-Voting
Zhyar Rzgar K Rostam, G\'abor Kert\'esz

The Supreme Court will evaluate Trump's expansive claims of presidential power in its new term (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-trump-executive-power-lgbtq-voting-98285156a1279b2ff7fe15b8d96eef37
http://www.memeorandum.com/251006/p44#a251006p44

B-Privacy: Defining and Enforcing Privacy in Weighted Voting
Samuel Breckenridge, Dani Vilardell, Andr\'es F\'abrega, Amy Zhao, Patrick McCorry, Rafael Solari, Ari Juels
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17871

B-Privacy: Defining and Enforcing Privacy in Weighted Voting
In traditional, one-vote-per-person voting systems, privacy equates with ballot secrecy: voting tallies are published, but individual voters' choices are concealed. Voting systems that weight votes in proportion to token holdings, though, are now prevalent in cryptocurrency and web3 systems. We show that these weighted-voting systems overturn existing notions of voter privacy. Our experiments demonstrate that even with secret ballots, publishing raw tallies often reveals voters' choices. We…

wiki_rfa: Wikipedia RfA voting network (2013)
The set of all votes on Requests for Adminships (RfA), from 2003 to May 2013, represented as a directed, signed network in which nodes represent Wikipedia members and edges represent votes.
This network has 11381 nodes and 198275 edges.
Tags: Social, Relationships, Signed
https://

Federal Court Orders Trump to Answer on Actions Taken for Anti-Voting Order (Yunior Rivas/Democracy Docket)
https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/federal-court-orders-trump-to-answer-on-actions-taken-for-anti-voting-order/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250801/p133#a250801p133

Nancy Mace under fire after Trump-voting town hall attendee 'jeered' for not clapping - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/nancy-mace-republican-town-hall/

Officials in a large North Texas county decided this week to cut more than 100 Election Day polling sites -- and reduce the number of early voting locations,
amid growing concern about GOP efforts to limit voting access ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
The 3-2 vote on Tuesday by commissioners in Tarrant County, 💥which includes Fort Worth,
came one day after Donald Trump vowed to end the use of mail-in ballots.
The president lacks the unilateral power to decid…

A Texas County Cuts Over 100 Polling Sites as Trump Attacks Mail-In Voting Nationally
The decision by commissioners in Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, comes amid growing concern about GOP efforts to limit voting access ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

MSLEF: Multi-Segment LLM Ensemble Finetuning in Recruitment
Omar Walid, Mohamed T. Younes, Khaled Shaban, Mai Hassan, Ali Hamdi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06200 https://

MSLEF: Multi-Segment LLM Ensemble Finetuning in Recruitment
This paper presents MSLEF, a multi-segment ensemble framework that employs LLM fine-tuning to enhance resume parsing in recruitment automation. It integrates fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) using weighted voting, with each model specializing in a specific resume segment to boost accuracy. Building on MLAR , MSLEF introduces a segment-aware architecture that leverages field-specific weighting tailored to each resume part, effectively overcoming the limitations of single-model systems by …

Trump faces a hurdle in banning mail-in voting: His own Republican Party (NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-hurdle-banning-mail-voting-republican-party-rcna227256
http://www.memeorandum.com/250831/p56#a250831p56

The Majority is not always right: RL training for solution aggregation
Wenting Zhao, Pranjal Aggarwal, Swarnadeep Saha, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jason Weston, Ilia Kulikov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06870

The Majority is not always right: RL training for solution aggregation
Scaling up test-time compute, by generating multiple independent solutions and selecting or aggregating among them, has become a central paradigm for improving large language models (LLMs) on challenging reasoning tasks. While most prior work relies on simple majority voting or reward model ranking to aggregate solutions, these approaches may only yield limited benefits. In this work, we propose to learn aggregation as an explicit reasoning skill: given a set of candidate solutions, we train an…

Bid to overturn Washington state voting map falters in Ninth Circuit
https://www.courthousenews.com/bid-to-overturn-washington-state-voting-map-falters-in-ninth-circuit/

wiki_rfa: Wikipedia RfA voting network (2013)
The set of all votes on Requests for Adminships (RfA), from 2003 to May 2013, represented as a directed, signed network in which nodes represent Wikipedia members and edges represent votes.
This network has 11381 nodes and 198275 edges.
Tags: Social, Relationships, Signed
https://

The Supreme Court Just Signaled Something Deeply Disturbing About the Next Term (Richard L. Hasen/Slate)
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/08/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-clarence-thomas-message.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/250804/p54#a250804p54

Inference Attacks on Encrypted Online Voting via Traffic Analysis
Anastasiia Belousova, Francesco Marchiori, Mauro Conti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15694 https://

Inference Attacks on Encrypted Online Voting via Traffic Analysis
Online voting enables individuals to participate in elections remotely, offering greater efficiency and accessibility in both governmental and organizational settings. As this method gains popularity, ensuring the security of online voting systems becomes increasingly vital, as the systems supporting it must satisfy a demanding set of security requirements. Most research in this area emphasizes the design and verification of cryptographic protocols to protect voter integrity and system confiden…

At the behest of Donald Trump, Texas is pushing to gerrymander congressional maps to add as many as five seats for Republicans
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/05/texas-redistricting-voter-maps-democrats-e…

Appeals Court Delivers Another Blow to Voting Rights Act (Yunior Rivas/Democracy Docket)
https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/appeals-court-delivers-another-blow-to-voting-rights-act/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250728/p110#a250728p110

Supreme Court pauses ruling that potentially weakens the Voting Rights Act - SCOTUSblog
https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/07/supreme-court-pauses-ruling-that-potentially-weakens-the-voting-rights-act/

Supreme Court signals it may rule on law protecting power of minority voters (Justin Jouvenal/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/08/02/supreme-court-louisiana-voting-rights-act/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250802/p47#a250802p47

Trump’s administration warned Republicans Tuesday that voting to release more files on Jeffrey Epstein would be seen as an act of war.
Republican Representative Thomas Massie is leading the charge on moving for a House vote to release the Epstein files in full,
following the GOP-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s lackluster release of more than 33,000 documents on the child sex offender Tuesday night -- 97 percent of which had already been made public.
Re…

Trump Desperately Tries to Kill Petition to Release Epstein Files
The White House said yesterday that the petition to force a vote on the release of the files was “a hostile act.”

Breaking: Supreme Court, in Order Asking for Additional Briefing in Louisiana Voting Case, Appears to Put the Constitutionality of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act into Question (Rick Hasen/Election Law Blog)
https://electionlawblog.org/?p=151301
http://www.memeorandum.com/250801/p128#a250801p128

Republicans keep voting for bills they say they don't like
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republicans-keep-voting-bills-say-dont-like-rcna219353

Louisana asks Supreme Court to gut Voting Rights Act and ban use of race in redistricting (Zach Montellaro/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/27/louisiana-callais-scotus-redistricting-voting-rights-act-00532223
http://www.memeorandum.com/250827/p133#a250827p133

NAACP sues Texas over congressional redistricting,
saying it strips Black voters of political power
The organization’s suit also says that the redrawn Texas maps violate section 2 of the Voting Rights Act
https://www.theguardian.c…

David Valadao battles backlash in his swing district after voting for Medicaid cuts that hit close to home (NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/david-valadao-backlash-swing-district-voting-medicaid-cuts-rcna219992
http://www.memeorandum.com/250726/p5#a250726p5