In 2025, AI is poised to change every aspect of democratic politics--but it won't necessarily be for the worse. India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, has used AI to translate his speeches for his multilingual electorate in real time, demonstrating how AI can help diverse democracies to be more inclusive. AI avatars were used by presidential candidates in South Korea in electioneering, enabling them to provide answers to thousands of voters' questions simultaneously. We are also starting to see AI tools aid fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts. AI techniques are starting to augment more traditional polling methods, helping campaigns get cheaper and faster data.

"From far away," he says, cracking a small grin. "I will cheer them both on from far, far away." The so-called AI Yoon--as in Artificial Intelligence Yoon--sounds, looks and gestures much like the real-life, conservative politician who is in a close race for South Korea's presidential election on Wednesday--although with much more mischievous humor. A sharp-tongued former prosecutor, the 61-year-old Mr. Yoon is new to politics and wanted an efficient way to reach out to the electorate. He needed to pursue young voters and sought a softer public image, and had just roughly three weeks to officially campaign by law.

On October 18, 2016, the New York Times gave Hillary Clinton a ninety-one-per-cent chance of beating Donald Trump. Five days later, ABC News released a tracking poll showing her ahead of Trump by twelve points. Buoyed by the polls, Democrats--especially Democratic women--approached November 8th with a joyful sense of inevitability. The collective disbelief when Clinton lost was tinged with confusion: How could the pollsters have been so wrong? Now, with Joe Biden leading Trump by double digits in the lead-up to Election Day, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey, the question has to be asked: Are voters hoping for a Biden victory about to fall in the same trap?

Voting rules allow multiple agents to aggregate their preferences in order to reach joint decisions. A common flaw of some voting rules, known as the no-show paradox, is that agents may obtain a more preferred outcome by abstaining from an election. We study strategic abstention for set-valued voting rules based on Kelly's and Fishburn's preference extensions. Our contribution is twofold. First, we show that, whenever there are at least five alternatives and seven agents, every Pareto-optimal majoritarian voting rule suffers from the no-show paradox with respect to Fishburn's extension. This is achieved by reducing the statement to a finite - yet very large - problem, which is encoded as a formula in propositional logic and then shown to be unsatisfiable by a SAT solver. We also provide a human-readable proof which we extracted from a minimal unsatisfiable core of the formula. Secondly, we prove that every voting rule that satisfies two natural conditions cannot be manipulated by strategic abstention with respect to Kelly's extension and give examples of well-known Pareto-optimal majoritarian voting rules that meet these requirements.

The lesson of Trump's victory is not that data is dead. The lesson is that data is flawed. It has always been flawed--and always will be. Before Donald Trump won the presidency on Tuesday night, everyone from Nate Silver to The New York Times to CNN predicted a Trump loss--and by sizable margins. "The tools that we would normally use to help us assess what happened failed," Trump campaign reporter Maggie Haberman said in the Times. As Haberman explained, this happened on both sides of the political divide.

Jump to an update: • Waiting for Hillary on a gray morning • A few thoughts on the unthinkable • Palin speaks at the Trump party • Trump's path • Settling in for the night at Hillary Clinton's party • If Trump wins, he would likely also control all three branches of government • A new electoral map is upending the old one • The part of the night when Democrats start to freak out • Marco Rubio, again • The exit polls show a breakdown in demographics that is entirely predictable • A shooting near a polling place in Los Angeles • Early exit polls: No evidence Comey made a difference • Is the South still the conservative heartland? Clinton's motorcade arrived soon after. At campaign events and at her party last night, Clinton was permanently inside a huge bubble of safe space guarded by the Secret Service. At today's event, they were nowhere to be seen. Clinton arrived in a small caravan that stopped in a busy street. The only visible protection was provided by a handful of New York cops who hadn't received notice she was coming just then and halfheartedly tried to convince a crowd to move backward. Soon, Clinton's staff and the crowd and a few people who happened to have been walking down the street were mashed together for a panicky moment. A bicyclist, nearby, screamed, "Get out of the way, you fucking morons."--A. The executive branch of the United States government has grown in its power over the past eight years. After 9/11, George W. Bush built an aggressive national-security apparatus that Barack Obama only partially reined in. To cite just one of the powers that Commander-in-Chief Donald J. Trump would acquire, the American President has grown comfortable with killing alleged terrorists remotely with unmanned vehicles. Congress has done little in the way of oversight of this program, and it is just one of the many new powers Trump could inherit. Similarly, Congress has shown no interest in rewriting the overly broad war authorizations that Bush and Obama used to wage campaigns across the Middle East and Africa. As Congress and the White House became unable to pass legislation, Obama also pushed the boundaries with respect to the use of executive orders. These can be rescinded on day one of a Trump Presidency, but, just as important, Trump will undoubtedly push the boundaries of executive orders beyond what Obama did.

On Thursday, June 23, 51.9% of the over 33 million who voted opted for the UK to leave the EU. By June 27, the pound had fallen to a 31 year low against the dollar. On the same day, Ireland's foreign minister was forced to issue a plea asking UK nationals to "stop rushing for Irish passports", as post offices in Belfast ran out of application forms. Up to 7% of those who had voted to leave now regretted their decision, according to media reports. Regardless of the turnout, two commonly known economic principles ensure that referenda will always be inherently flawed policy instruments.

On The Tonight Show, in March 1978, the late astronomer Carl Sagan had lots to talk about. He had just published Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence--which would win the Pulitzer Prize--and Star Wars, released the year before, still captivated the public's imagination. When Johnny Carson, the show's then-host, asked Sagan to expand on some comments he'd made prior to the evening, about the film's indifference to scientific accuracy, Sagan said the "11-year-old in me loved" it, but it "could have made a better effort to do things right." His critique would resonate today: After making the biological point that the Star Wars scenario--humans evolving long ago, in a faraway galaxy--is vastly improbable, Sagan said there's another problem: "They're all white." Carson, pushing back a bit, said, "They did have a scene in Star Wars with a lot of strange characters."

Many electoral control and manipulation problems — which we will refer to in general as manipulative actions problems — are NP-hard in the general case.  Many of these problems fall into polynomial time if the electorate is single-peaked, i.e., is  polarized along some axis/issue. However, real-world electorates are not truly single-peaked — for example, there may be some maverick voters — and to take this into account, we study the complexity of manipulative-action algorithms for  the case of nearly single-peaked electorates.

For many election systems, bribery (and related) attacks have been shown NP-hard using constructions on combinatorially rich structures such as partitions and covers. It is important to learn how robust these hardness protection results are, in order to find whether they can be relied on in practice. This paper shows that for voters who follow the most central political-science model of electorates — single-peaked preferences — those protections vanish. By using single-peaked preferences to simplify combinatorial covering challenges, we show that NP-hard bribery problems — including those for Kemeny and Llull elections- — fall to polynomial time. By using single-peaked preferences to simplify combinatorial partition challenges, we show that NP-hard partition-of-voters problems fall to polynomial time. We furthermore show that for single-peaked electorates, the winner problems for Dodgson and Kemeny elections, though Θ 2 p -complete in the general case, fall to polynomial time. And we completely classify the complexity of weighted coalition manipulation for scoring protocols in single-peaked electorates.