Related topics: barack obama

Social instability lies ahead, researcher says

Cliodynamics is a new "transdisciplinary discipline" that treats history as just another science. Ten years ago I started applying its tools to the society I live in: the United States. What I discovered alarmed me.

Forecasting elections with a model of infectious diseases

Forecasting elections is a high-stakes problem. Politicians and voters alike are often desperate to know the outcome of a close race, but providing them with incomplete or inaccurate predictions can be misleading. And election ...

Perfect NCAA bracket? Near impossible, mathematician says

The odds of picking a perfect bracket for the NCAA men's basketball March Madness championship tournament are a staggering less than one in 9.2 quintillion (that's 9,223,372,036,854,775,808), according to Jeff Bergen, mathematics ...

Data scientists build more honest prediction models

On Nov. 3, 2020—and for many days after—millions of people kept a wary eye on the presidential election prediction models run by various news outlets. With such high stakes in play, every tick of a tally and twitch of ...

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Election

An election is a decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold formal office. This is the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy fills offices in the legislature, sometimes in the executive and judiciary, and for regional and local government. This process is also used in many other private and business organizations, from clubs to voluntary associations and corporations.

The universal use of elections as a tool for selecting representatives in modern democracies is in contrast with the practice in the democratic archetype, ancient Athens. Elections were considered an oligarchic institution and most political offices were filled using sortition, also known as allotment, by which officeholders were chosen by lot.

Electoral reform describes the process of introducing fair electoral systems where they are not in place, or improving the fairness or effectiveness of existing systems. Psephology is the study of results and other statistics relating to elections (especially with a view to predicting future results).

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