Jeff O'Neill

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Choosing a runoff election threshold

Public Choice

Jan 2007

This article investigates how the choice of a voting system impacts the right to vote. It presents the first comprehensive summary of the usage of alternative voting systems in the United States and also the first comprehensive summary of the caselaw on voting systems. Two aspects of the right to vote are considered: the right to an equally effective vote and the right to a reliable electoral outcome. The right to an equally effective of vote is considered as a generalization and unification of disparate but related rights. The only voting system that clearly violates this right is at-large voting. Commentators have previously criticized the discriminatory effects of at-large voting, but not in the last twenty years. This article takes a fr

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Everything That Can Be Counted Does Not Necessarily Count: The Right to Vote and the Choice of a Voting System

Michigan State Law Review

Jan 2006

Cited by (1) the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Dudum v. Arntz (http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2011/05/20/10-17198.pdf) where the court upheld ranked-choice voting in San Francisco, and (2) the City of Minneapolis in its brief (http://fairvotemn.org/sites/fairvotemn.org/files/IRV%20lawsuit_City%20Reply.pdf) successfully arguing for the constitutionality of IRV under state law. This paper investigates when a runoff election is desirable and when a plurality result is good enough. A runoff election increases the likelihood that the Condorcet winner will be elected but also entails additional costs. The metric for determining whether a runoff election is desirable will be the probability that the winner of the plurality elec

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The Legality of Maher Arar’s Treatment Under U.S. Immigration Law

BENDERS IMMIGR BULL

Aug 2005

This article presents a short summary of the relevant facts concerning Mr. Arar's detention in the United States in the fall of 2002 and his subsequent rendition to Syria, where he was allegedly tortured and detained for a year before finally being released without charges. The article defines rendition and extraordinary rendition and provides an overview of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. The article then summarizes U.S. immigration provisions for removing someone from the United States, applies U.S. immigration law to the facts of Mr. Arar's case, and concludes that U.S. authorities probably violated Article 3 of the Convention Against Torture by rendering Mr. Arar to Syria, where he faced a known and serious risk of being

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Virtues and Vices of Quartic Time-Frequency Distributions

IEEE Trans on Signal Processing

Sep 2000

We present results concerning three different types of quartic (fourth order) time-frequency distributions (TFDs). First, we present new results on the previously introduced local ambiguity function and show that it provides more reliable estimates of instantaneous chirp rate than the Wigner distribution. Second, we introduce the class of quartic, shift-covariant, time-frequency distributions and investigate distributions that localize quadratic chirps. Finally, we present a shift covariant distribution of time and chirp rate.

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On the Existence of Discrete Wigner Distributions

IEEE Signal Processing Letters

Dec 1999

Among the myriad of time-frequency distributions, the Wigner distribution stands alone in satisfying many desirable mathematical properties. Attempts to extend definitions of the Wigner distribution to discrete signals have not been completely successful. In this letter, we propose an alternative definition for the Wigner distribution, which has a clear extension to discrete signals. Under this definition, we show that the Wigner distribution does not exist for certain classes of discrete signals.

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A Function of Time, Frequency, Lag, and Doppler

IEEE Trans Signal Processing

Mar 1999

In signal processing, four functions of one variable are commonly used. They are the signal in time, the spectrum, the auto-correlation function of the signal, and the auto-correlation function of the spectrum. The variables of these functions are denoted, respectively, as time, frequency, lag, and Doppler. In time-frequency analysis, these functions of one variable are extended to quadratic functions of two variables. In this paper, we investigate a method for creating quartic functions of three of these variables as well as a quartic function of all four variables. These quartic functions provide a meaningful representation of the signal that goes beyond the well-known quadratic functions. The quartic functions are applied to the design o

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Shift-Covariant Time-Frequency Distributions of Discrete Signals

IEEE Trans Signal Processing

Jan 1999

Many commonly used time-frequency distributions are members of the Cohen (1989) class. This class is defined for continuous signals, and since time-frequency distributions in the Cohen class are quadratic, the formulation for discrete signals is not straightforward. The Cohen class can be derived as the class of all quadratic time-frequency distributions that are covariant to time shifts and frequency shifts. We extend this method to three types of discrete signals to derive what we call the discrete Cohen classes. The properties of the discrete Cohen classes differ from those of the original Cohen class. To illustrate these properties, we also provide explicit relationships between the classical Wigner distribution and the discrete Cohen c

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