A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of the Robustness of (Real-World) Election Winners

Abstract

Contributing to the toolbox for interpreting election results, we evaluate the robustness of election winners to random noise. We compare the robustness of different voting rules and evaluate the robustness of real-world election winners from the Formula 1 World Championship and some variant of political elections. We find many instances of elections that have very non-robust winners and numerous delicate robustness patterns that cannot be identified using classical and simpler approaches.