Minor partyA minor party is a political party that plays a smaller (in some cases much smaller, even insignificant in comparison) role than a major party in a country's politics and elections. The difference between minor and major parties can be so great that the membership total, donations, and the candidates that they are able to produce or attract are very distinct. Some of the minor parties play almost no role in a country's politics because of their low recognition, vote and donations.
FairVoteFairVote, formerly the Center for Voting and Democracy, is a 501(c)(3) organization that advocates electoral reform in the United States. Founded in 1992 as Citizens for Proportional Representation to support the implementation of proportional representation in American elections, the organization in 1993 became the Center for Voting and Democracy and in 2004 changed its name to FairVote to reflect its support of such proposals as instant-runoff voting (IRV), for single and multi-winner elections, a national popular vote for president, a right-to-vote amendment to the Constitution, and universal voter registration.
Ballot accessElections in the United States refers to the rules and procedures regulating the conditions under which a candidate, political party, or ballot measure is entitled to appear on voters' ballots. As the nation's election process is decentralized by Article I, Section 4, of the United States Constitution, ballot access laws are established and enforced by the states. As a result, ballot access processes may vary from one state to another.
Open dataOpen data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-source)" movements such as open-source software, open-source hardware, open content, open specifications, open education, open educational resources, open government, open knowledge, open access, open science, and the open web. The growth of the open data movement is paralleled by a rise in intellectual property rights.
Plurality (voting)A plurality vote (in American English) or relative majority (in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth) describes the circumstance when a party, candidate, or proposition polls more votes than any other but does not receive more than half of all votes cast. For example, if from 100 votes that were cast, 45 were for Candidate A, 30 were for Candidate B and 25 were for Candidate C, then Candidate A received a plurality of votes but not a majority.
Dominant-party systemA dominant-party system, or one-party dominant system, is a political occurrence in which a single political party continuously dominates election results over running opposition groups or parties. Any ruling party staying in power for more than one consecutive term may be considered a dominant party (also referred to as a predominant or hegemonic party). Some dominant parties were called the natural governing party, given their length of time in power.
SupermajorityA supermajority, (supra-majority, supramajority, qualified majority, or special majority) is a requirement for a proposal to gain a specified level of support which is greater than the threshold of more than one-half used for a simple majority. Supermajority rules in a democracy can help to prevent a majority from eroding fundamental rights of a minority, but they can also hamper efforts to respond to problems and encourage corrupt compromises at times when action is taken.
Hierarchy of evidenceA hierarchy of evidence, comprising levels of evidence (LOEs), that is, evidence levels (ELs), is a heuristic used to rank the relative strength of results obtained from experimental research, especially medical research. There is broad agreement on the relative strength of large-scale, epidemiological studies. More than 80 different hierarchies have been proposed for assessing medical evidence. The design of the study (such as a case report for an individual patient or a blinded randomized controlled trial) and the endpoints measured (such as survival or quality of life) affect the strength of the evidence.
Active learning (machine learning)Active learning is a special case of machine learning in which a learning algorithm can interactively query a user (or some other information source) to label new data points with the desired outputs. In statistics literature, it is sometimes also called optimal experimental design. The information source is also called teacher or oracle. There are situations in which unlabeled data is abundant but manual labeling is expensive. In such a scenario, learning algorithms can actively query the user/teacher for labels.
Supervised learningSupervised learning (SL) is a paradigm in machine learning where input objects (for example, a vector of predictor variables) and a desired output value (also known as human-labeled supervisory signal) train a model. The training data is processed, building a function that maps new data on expected output values. An optimal scenario will allow for the algorithm to correctly determine output values for unseen instances. This requires the learning algorithm to generalize from the training data to unseen situations in a "reasonable" way (see inductive bias).
