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The article presents a study on how ballot order affects voting patterns particularly in the case of the Irish 1973 General Election. The study indicated that candidates who come first in the alphabetically sorted list of candidates will have a distinct advantage. This conclusion was further validated in another study of the June 1973 Assembly elections in Northern Ireland. The study thus called for randomizing the order in which names are placed on the voting paper in elections.

The article informs that the mail balloting during December 1972 resulted in the election of Robert Lane as president of the Policy Studies Organization (PSO), Duncan MacRae as vice-president and president-elect, and Stuart Nagel as secretary-treasurer. The article also provides names of seven persons elected as at-large members of the PSO. The mail balloting also resulted in ratifying the proposed constitution. Some of the recommended constitutional changes like broadening the PSO to include the promotion of the application of social science, not just political science, to important policy problems and providing more nonacademic representation.

The article discusses the unicameral legislature of Jerusalem, Israel called the Knesset. It highlights election of the Knesset members, their composition based on diverse social criteria and their proceedings. The 120 members of the Knesset are elected on the basis of a rigid proportional representation system, with the entire country serving as a single constituency. The ballot paper does not contain any names of candidates, but merely the letter or letters by which a given list has been officially designated and any inscription added by the voter to this ballot suffices to invalidate it. Two general trends have been noticed in the Knesset, the reduction in size of the splinter-groups and the unequal momentum of the shifts as between various parties. The religious parties seem to have the most steadfast hold on their followers. The composition of the Knesset members is characterized by diverse social criteria including age, origin, education, sex and occupational structure. The Knesset meets for eight months during the year, three days a week. The members of the Knesset are customarily bound much more by party discipline than is the case with most Western countries. Women members often take a united stand in speech and vote when it comes to the status of women and children. Diversity of attitude is often encountered and tolerated within parties in the Knesset.

This article focuses on a legislation on marking ballots. The ballot law of every state contains a section on how to mark the paper ballot. This section, brief in some states and detailed in others, covers the following points: the method of marking, materials to be used, the use of the write-in privilege and of pasters, and instructions to be printed on the ballot. For this study, which is limited to general elections, the laws and the ballots of all the forty-eight states have been examined. When there is irregularity of marking the practice is to allow the intention of the voter, if discernible, to prevail. Five states allow a combination of the cross mark and scratching or lining out. The Georgia law prescribes the use of the cross in the party- column parentheses for straight ticket voting, but requires that the voter line out the names of undesired candidates when a split ticket is voted. The Texas voter may vote a straight ticket by running a line vertically through all party columns voted against; he may vote a mixed ticket by running a line horizontally through the names of such candidates as he desires to vote against in the column of his preferred party and writing in the name of the candidate for whom he wishes to vote or leaving unscratched the desired names in other columns.

Under the assumption that voters have linear preference orders, this study investigates the propensity of simple weighted scoring rules to yield a winning alternative which is the game as the alternative (if any) which would win using a norm rule such as the simple-majority rule or the Borda rule. The scoring rules examined are of the types implemented by ballot instructions such as "vote for two of the following seven alternatives" and "indicate your first (1), second (2), and third (3) choices from the following list of ten candidates." The results, which apply only to situations where one of s number of alternatives is to be chosen on the basis of a single ballot, may be useful in designing balloting and scoring procedures for these types of situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The course of development of straw polls divides itself logically, and to a large extent chronologically, into five phases. The first phase covers the early attempts to use the sampling method in gauging public opinion. Straw polls have been conducted by newspapers from almost the turn of the century. The task of planning the poll and supervising the collection of ballots was usually assigned to a hardpressed reporter who knew little of the technique of sampling. The second phase comprises the popularization of straw polls by the literary Digest. In 1916 this magazine discovered the possibilities of straw polls as vehicles for circulation drives. The third phase was marked by studies of straw-poll technique by research students. In 1928, Professor W. L. Crum of Harvard University undertook interpretation of the Digest returns by analyzing the shift of sentiment from past to present preferences. The fourth phase is characterized by the appearance of polls organized by trained statisticians and employing statistical principles widely recognized as sound.

The affairs of the Society subsequent to the Washington meeting, in so far as they have involved policy decisions, have been conducted by the Executive Committee and the Council. Following is a report of the actions taken by them since September, 1955. The Minutes of the 1956 Council meetings at Washington, D.C., were approved by mail ballot and have been published in the December 1955 issue of the Review. In regard to future annual meetings, the following actions were taken: In regard to the general arrangements of future annual meetings, the Council unanimously approved the Executive Committee's proposal that the Council or Executive Committee should determine the general location of each meeting, but that the selection of the headquarters site and the arrangement of details should be left in the hands of the Executive Office, the Secretary and the President-Elect who will be responsible for the meeting. The Executive Committee decided to investigate possible alternative arrangements for 1957 in view of the plan of the American Psychological Association to meet at Miami Beach in 1957.

The article presents information regarding the official reports and proceedings of a Committee of sociologists. The article provides the names of the nominees who would be standing for the 1965 elections. President Pitirim A. Sorokin formed a Committee of sociologists which constituted of several members. The following nominees were placed on the ballots with alternative forms giving a different order of the candidates' names. For the President's post Charles P. Loomis and William H. Seweli were elected. Rudolf Heberle and N.S. Timasheff were elected for the post of Vice-President. Ballots were mailed to 3,622 Fellow and Active members with the stated return deadline of May 24 (or May 31 for members living abroad). By IBM tally, 1,944 voting of the Association, in secret ballot ternative forms with the different order of listing candidate names, elected the following nominees: Charles P. Loomis was elecetd for the post of President, Rudolf Heberle was elected for the post of Vice-President, Marshall B. Clinard, Oswald Hall, Gerbard Lenski and J. Milton Yinger was elected as council members.

In accordance with the American Sociological Society's by-laws and with due regard for the fields of specialization and the geographical distribution of the members, president Robin M. Williams appointed the Committee on Nominations and Elections. The committee first cast four ballots in order to nominate the candidates for president-elect before proceeding to two further ballots on the other candidates. The slate was finally accepted on December 26, 1957. Ballots were mailed from the executive office on February 24, 1958 to the 2,519 active members of the society. In line with the suggestion made by the 1957 committee, ballots were sent by air mail to members in distant foreign countries. Ballots were returned by April 1, 1958 by 1,382 members, who constitute 55 per cent of the voting membership. Write-in votes mentioned over one hundred additional names, but no one person received more than three write-in votes for any office. The committee wishes to bring to the attention of the society the advisability of investigating the feasibility of mechanical means of ballot counting. This suggestion is prompted by the tremendous amount of time that went into the counting of ballots, a chore which will grow with the inevitable increase in the society's membership.

The article presents information about various activities taking place in the executive office of American Sociological Association (ASA). Ballots for the national election of officers have been mailed to all voting members in January 1972. A two-part referendum is included on the proposed by-laws change to abolish the joint membership classification and to change the structure of the Annual Meeting Program Committee. Along with the ballots, members will receive a brief questionnaire for the ASA readership survey. It will take only a few minutes to complete and should he returned in the same envelope as the ballot. Preparation has begun for the 1972-73 Guide to Graduate Departments of Sociology. The chairman of each department listed in last year's Guide will receive a request for pertinent information next month. Since the publication of the roster of ASA committees in the November Socio-Log, some additions and changes have been made. Norval O. Glenn has been elected chairman of the Committee on Classification and Joel Smith has been elected chairman of the Committee on Training and Professional Standards.