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Joint Applied Math and Probability Seminar
Sensitivity of voting and coin tossing schemes
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In an imaginary country a vote for presidency between two candidates is to be conducted. Due to technical imperfections of voting machines each vote is flipped independtly with some small probability p. Which voting schemes are more sensitive to this perturbation? Is majority vote more sensitive than electoral college vote? We will discuss this problem, closely related coins tossing protocols and see how a variety of techniques from probability and Markov chains, linear programing, discrete Fourier analysis, hyper-contractivity and isoperimetry shade some light on different aspects of this problem. Based on joint works with: Gil Kalai, Olle Haggstrom, Ryan O'donnell, Oded Regev, Jeff Steif and Benny Sudakov. |