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The article explores the role of politicians in representative democracies and their impact on decision-making processes. It highlights the potential for bad apples, or unethical and incompetent politicians, to compromise the democratic process. The article suggests that conscientious politicians may need to compromise their moral convictions to resist bad apples and gain necessary support. It also discusses the benefits of public deliberation in empowering politicians to make informed compromises and resist the influence of bad apples. The article emphasizes the complexities and challenges of achieving political competence in representative democracies. [Extracted from the article]

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Large proportions of spoilt ballots may lead to a distortion of election results. While invalid votes are sometimes meaningful political acts, reflecting political protest, spoilt ballot papers may also be a consequence of voter error, which can be attributed to the poor design of a ballot paper. In this study, we focus on the widely publicized case of the Polish local elections of 2014. These elections saw unprecedentedly large proportions of spoilt votes, and ballot paper format was often mentioned as a potential culprit. Yet it remains largely unclear whether or not there indeed does exist a cause-and-effect relationship between ballot card format and the tendency of voters to cast invalid votes. We argue that what we deliver here is the first methodologically refined test of the aforementioned hypothesis. We apply the generalized synthetic control comparative method, proposed by Yiquing Xu (in 2017), and show that the implementation of a complex or ambiguous ballot design can result in a substantial increase in the rate of spoilt votes. We thus demonstrate that ballot paper design matters. Specifically, the results of this study corroborate the existence of a cause-and-effect relationship between ballot paper format and the fraction of invalid votes in the 2014 municipal elections in Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overriding principle of ballot design is that it should not confer any a priori advantage to one candidate over another. Ballot format should not determine or condition an election outcome. Yet, there is a sizeable body of evidence which demonstrates that in many circumstances the design of ballot papers and voting machines contravenes the normative assumption of electoral neutrality. In this article, we look at the impact of ballot paper design at local elections in the Republic of Ireland (hereafter Ireland). The article uses data from an experimental election study conducted at the local elections in Ireland in 2009. Overall the study finds some evidence of a primacy effect and it also demonstrates that candidates located in the middle of the ballot face a challenge as they receive the lowest vote shares of all candidates across the four replica ballots. This mid-table obscurity remains even when party affiliation is known. Thus, it can be argued that candidates placed in such positions incur a disadvantage. To neutralise this effect, the article concludes with a recommendation that a system of random ordering of ballot positions across ballot papers should be implemented so as to ensure that each candidate appears at each ballot position on an equal number of times. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite their unmistakable advantages, the use of voting machines in elections is a topic of vivid debates. This article focuses on the experiences of voters using three types of voting equipment: (a) a paper ballot, (b) a voting machine, and (c) a voting machine with paper audit trail. An independent-groups experiment was conducted in which voters had to cast a vote for a donation to a charity organization and afterwards filled out a questionnaire about their voting experiences. The paper ballot was considered to be the most anonymous way of voting, especially by female voters. The voting machine (with or without paper trail), on the other hand, was considered to be more user-friendly than the paper ballot and gave the voters more confidence that their votes would actually be processed correctly. No differences were found between the voting machine with and without paper audit trail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars concur that free and fair elections are essential for proper democratic functioning, but our understanding of the political effects of democratic voting systems is incomplete. This article mitigates the gap by exploiting the gradual transformation of voting systems and ballot structures in Brazil's 1998 executive elections to study the relationship between voting systems and viable and nonviable candidates' vote shares, using regression discontinuity design. It finds that the introduction of electronic voting concentrated vote shares among viable candidates and thus exhibited electoral bias. We posit that this result occurred because viable candidates were better able to communicate the information that electronic voters needed to cast valid ballots than were their nonviable counterparts. The article uses survey data to demonstrate that electronic voters responded to changes in ballot design and internalized the information viable candidates made available to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The humble ballot paper is a defining technology of elections throughout the world. This article interrogates its contested past by demonstrating - over a long period and in the context of three contrasting countries - how and why it emerged in the early modern period and how it was then used, abused and regulated in the context of the expanded, and eventually mass, electoral arenas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ironically, by the time that the ballot paper was firmly established, its monopoly was already being challenged by mechanical and then electronic media, which may eventually condemn it to extinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the voter intent laws in the U.S. and their potential effects for the counting of paper ballots. Other topics include the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and its provision on voter intent determination, the ballot-counting provisions based on rules versus standards, and the historic vote-by-mail (VBM) voter participation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Abstract: Methods for estimating turnout in multi-member plurality (MMP) elections where the number of ballot papers issued is unknown tend to focus upon the distribution of votes between parties. This paper shows that existing methods may lead to significant errors in turnout estimates for English local government elections. We introduce a new method of calculating voter turnout that uses not only the total number of votes cast, but also information relating to the presence or absence of candidates and the distribution of votes between candidates of the same party. This method not only appears to improve substantially upon previously used algorithms, but also demonstrates that partial abstention is more likely when voters are presented with fewer of their chosen party''s candidates than the number of seats at stake. We believe that this new algorithm may have general application to MMP elections. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this article the author discusses aspects of ballots and voting practices in elections held in Scotland. At issue is a form of proportional representation called the mixed-member or additional member system, which requires the use of two separate paper ballots. In answer to protests that this system led to confusion and resulted in a higher number of spoiled and invalid ballots, a government board of inquiry was convened. The author endorses the finding of the commission which recommended changing the name of the voting system.

In a democratic regime, voting is crucial to making collective decisions. Unfortunately, although this activity has great significance and value, little effort has been made to improve the way we vote. Paper ballots are still the most used method, although this method is relatively simple, brings many inconveniences, and represents a contradiction to the modern world and its advances. This paper mostly focuses on a review study of blockchain-based voting systems. It aims at identifying the strategies and the guidelines as well as provides a comprehensive end-to-end electronic voting system based on blockchain, with the help of cryptographic techniques such as zero-knowledge proofs to improve privacy. The novelty of this paper is that we tackle the limitations of electronic voting systems found in the literature, including cost, identity management, and scalability problems. Our purpose is to provide key elements for organizations on how to design their proper electronic voting system based on blockchain technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What drives partisan competition over the pursuit of legislative majorities in contemporary congressional elections? While conventional wisdom suggests that the chances of a legislative majority is largely predicated on the public's ideological policy preferences or national standing of the president, there is little work assessing the dynamics of partisan competition over the course of the electoral cycle. Leveraging over 60 years of new generic congressional ballot data measuring the monthly preference of the mass public's partisan presence for the congressional majority, this paper finds that partisan competition for the majority largely centers on the national policy mood and the public perception of presidential performance rather than partisan conflict. This paper validates the importance of these findings relating to partisan competition for the legislative majority by showing that this electoral competition plays a significant role in predicting the national normal popular vote and partisan seat turnover from 1960 to 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many U.S. states require election workers to check signatures on ballots returned by mail, causing tens of thousands of ballots to be rejected at each general election. This paper applies Bayes' theorem, along with findings from prior research, to show how rejection rates are likely to vary under plausible assumptions about signature checker accuracy and the prevalence of invalid signatures. This approach yields a pair of predictions. On the one hand, given findings from research on handwriting forensics, the Bayesian analysis implies election workers are more likely to wrongly reject valid ballots for purported signature mismatch than to correctly reject invalidly signed returns. On the other hand, research on election workers as problem-solvers suggests they may try to minimize the wrongful rejection of ballots. I find empirical support for each prediction, including signs that election workers learn from past errors to calibrate signature rejection rates downwards. This suggests election worker discretion may be an unexpected source of resilience against laws otherwise liable to disenfranchise eligible voters, although I also discuss conditions under which such discretion may conflict with democratic norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is known that the position of a candidate's name on a ballot paper affects his chances of success. In multi-seat election it is possible to eliminate the effect of party differences by considering the party groups separately. If the ordered within-party outcome is expressed as a permutation of the positions on the ballot paper, then, because certain positions are favored by the voter, the probabilities of these permutations are not all equal. In this paper, a model is described, which allocates probabilities to the various permutations. The model is applied to two independent sets of results from recent ejections. It is found that certain apparent anomalies in these results are explained by the model, and that, contrary to general expectation, for the elections studied, it is the second position on the ballot paper which is most favored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there were a number of other administrative problems, the unusually large number of ballots rejected in the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections attracted considerable media interest and comment and provoked a special enquiry by the Electoral Commission. It is generally accepted that the new design of the ballot paper was the major factor in causing problems and that these problems were greatest in less well-off areas. So far, however, little attention has been paid to the views and perceptions of electors, especially with reference to the question of the legitimacy of elections. Analysis of specially collected survey data shows that the voters recognised that there were serious problems in the elections and, although offering a variety of explanations, tended to blame the authorities. Trust in the fairness of the electoral process has been reduced by the experience and this may result in reduced voter participation in future.British Politics (2009) 4, 3–21. doi:10.1057/bp.2008.29 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents several news on business developments. Topics discussed include Pixelle Specialty Solutions introducing a new portfolio of premium ballot papers for U.S. elections, CMG becoming the exclusive Alwan software distributor in North America, and the digitization trend in print and packaging, driven by sustainability and automation efforts.

This paper attempts to make a hierarchical assessment of graphic protection in order to enhance its use. It was established that the most common types of approved protection are also the best known ones and that their implementation enhances protection efficiency on products which are often counterfeit. Printing offices,publishers and design authors will protect their high demand products which are subject to counterfeiting by optimizing printing technology,implementation expenses and efficiency of the protection system. By means of a system of questioning and data processing,we created a scale of values of protective graphic technologies,inks and graphic materials. A survey showed that a large number of examinees believes in the possibility of counterfeit ballot papers and a hypothesis was tested which proved that 95% of citizens think that protective graphic techniques should be used to prevent the counterfeiting of ballot papers. We therefore recommend the individualization of ballot papers and the implementation of invisible graphics. It has been proved that citizens would have more confidence in the democratic elections if guaranteed the protection of ballot papers,which would finally result in the increased number of turnouts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the legal case of Rachel Andrews, a blind voter in the UK who challenged the lack of accessibility for disabled individuals in the voting system. The court dismissed her claim, stating that progress had been made in providing accommodations for disabled voters and that the right to vote is not absolute. The government subsequently amended the rules to require returning officers to provide equipment and support for disabled voters, but disability rights groups have expressed concerns about potential barriers. The effectiveness of the new rules will be tested in the upcoming 2024 general election. The case highlights the challenges of legal reform and the unintended consequences of litigation. [Extracted from the article]

In many democracies, citizens complain that elections do not provide palatable options - none of the candidates are particularly appealing. More candidates imply more choice, and could potentially increase participation. However, too many candidates may overburden voters and thus discourage participation. In this paper, we use election results and experimental data to show that more candidates results in less participation. Effects are apparent even when comparing ballots with two or three candidates and are not assuaged by party labels. Our results suggest that too much choice on election day can be just as bad as too little. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper "The best Condorcet‑compatible election method: Ranked Pairs" (Munger in Const Polit Econ 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-022-09382-w), the author identifies Tideman's ranked pairs method as the best single-winner voting method, while the Schulze method (Schulze in Soc Choice Welf 36(2):267–303, 2011; The Schulze method of voting, 2018. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.02973v12.pdf) comes in a close second. Munger (Munger in Const Polit Econ 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-022-09382-w) writes: "Beatpath (Schulze) emerges as Ranked Pair's chief competitor". In this comment, I will show that the scenario that Munger uses to argue against the Schulze method is not possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a smart contract-based multi-candidate self-tallying voting scheme in order to guarantee the privacy of ballots in the case of multiple candidates. This scheme uses the ElGamal cryptosystem to ensure the security of the ballots, and combines it with a Distributed Encryption algorithm to make the voting scheme have self-tallying features, and guarantees the correctness of the intermediate data through zero-knowledge proofs. The experimental results show that the scheme improves the voting efficiency without compromising the security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Block chain is presenting new chances to develop new categories of digital services. Even though research on the topic is still in its early stages, it has mostly focused on the technical and legal challenges rather than utilizing this ground-breaking concept and creating better digital services. The study offers a novel block-chain based E-voting system that tackles some of the drawbacks of current systems and assesses some of the well-known block chain frameworks in order to build a block-chain based E-voting system. It has long been challenging to develop a secure electronic voting system that maintains the fairness and privacy of paper ballots while ensuring the transparency and flexibility afforded by electronic systems in current electoral schemes. We concretely assess the technology's potential by explaining a case study, including the election process and the implementation of a blockchain-based application that improves security and reduces the cost of holding national elections. A block chain is a type of distributed database that is this allows for the sharing of all data among all network users. By definition, a block chain system has several benefits that are suitable for electronic voting system. It is independent of a centralized server because its distributed architecture guarantees great system performance. Availability. Since each participant has full data, using the protocol, they may verify each block uploaded to the chain regarding the electronic voting system we propose, the double envelope encryption is combined here. Block chain technology and technique. This is the mechanism for turning the people's opinions into action in order to better manage system. Traditional elections have not pleased either the people or the government in recent years. They are not completely secure because ballots are easily tampered with. Additionally, it raises concerns about transparency and voter safety. Furthermore, it takes far too long to count the votes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current traditional paper ballot voting schemes suffer from several limitations such as processing delays due to counting paper ballots, lack of transparency, and manipulation of the ballots. To solve these limitations, an electronic voting (e-voting) scheme has received massive interest from both governments and academia. In e-voting, individuals can cast their vote online using their smartphones without the need to wait in long lines. Additionally, handicapped voters who face limited wheelchair access in many polling centers could now participate in elections hassle-free. The existing e-voting schemes suffer from several limitations as they are either centralized, based on public blockchains, or utilize local private blockchains. This results in privacy issues (using public blockchains) or large financial costs (using local/private blockchains) due to the amount of computing power and technical knowledge needed to host blockchains locally. To address the aforementioned limitations, in this paper, we propose an online voting scheme using IBM cloud-based Hyperledger Fabric. Our scheme allows voters to cast their encrypted votes in a secure manner. Then any participant can obtain the ballot results in a decentralized and transparent manner, without sacrificing the privacy of individual voters. We implement the proposed scheme using IBM cloud-based Hyperledger Fabric. The experimental results identify the performance characteristics of our scheme and demonstrate that it is feasible to run an election consisting of thousands of participants using cloud-based Fabric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

24 The rest of this paper will focus primarily on stateless BMDs, wherein the paper ballot is the only way to know the voter's intent, and where vote casting is a manual process, where the voter moves the ballot to a 20 VVSG Vol 1, Version 1.1, section 3.2.2.2, pp. 48-49. 20 For hand-marked ballots, these scanners can flag common error modes, including when a voter has indicated more than one vote in a contest which allows at most one vote (i.e., "overvoting", which can never happen with a BMD, but is possible with hand-marked paper). 58 He offers as an example an election with 20 BMDs, each of which prints 140 ballots during an election, for a total of 2800 ballots, of which 14 ballots have been altered by malware in the BMDs. For contrast, consider the paper ballot in Broward County, Florida in 2018, where the contests for U.S. Senate and Congressional Representative were placed under the long ballot instructions in the left column, leading a potentially significant number of voters to miss them entirely 11. 7 Procedures for voters to spoil their ballots vary from state to state. [Extracted from the article]

Voters use traditional paper ballots, a method limited by the factors of time and space, to ensure their voting rights are exercised; this method requires a lot of manpower and resources. Duplicate voting problems may also occur, meaning the transparency and reliability of the voting results cannot be guaranteed. With the rapid developments in science and technology, E-voting system technology is being adopted more frequently in election activities. However, E-voting systems still cannot address the verifiability of the election process; the results of a given election and the credibility of the host organization will be questioned if the election's verifiability cannot be ensured. Elections may also pose a series of problems related to privacy, security, and so on. To address these issues, this paper presents a public, and verifiable E-voting system with hidden statistics; this system is based on commitment, zk-SNARKs, and machine learning. The system can deal with a large number of candidates, complex voting methods, and result functions in counting both hidden and public votes and can satisfy the requirements of verifiability, privacy, security, and intelligence. Our security analysis shows that our scheme achieves privacy, hidden vote counting and verifiability. Our performance evaluation demonstrates that our system has reasonable applications in real scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world is facing increasing crises such as climate, inequality and disease, which are set to impact student futures in devastating ways. Without a change in the way citizens think at the ballot box and the supermarket, these crises indicate an intensification of global disaster with very real consequences. This paper deploys critical theory in order to examine the efficacy of Educational Leadership in the 21st Century. It finds that the crises facing the planet are due to a domination of knowledges serving system-interests detrimental to the survival and happiness of the many. Despite such dismal outlooks, educational leadership is potentially highly influential and represents hope. It is ideally placed to facilitate the global mindedness and intersubjectivity required for future citizens to collectively tackle planetary problems. Despite the potential of educators to create change, this paper finds educational leadership thinking to be rooted in the system-world, producing, and demanding strategic action in line with post-Comptian positivism. This advances a focus upon external goods and a blindness toward its own advantage. Educational leadership requires an urgent change in thinking: one that embraces a critical hygiene of intersubjectivity, global mindedness, and communicative action, reimagining educational leadership as social practice in an interdependent world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper rekindles a three-decade-old debate in the annals of Indian anthropology / sociology which became dormant after no significant headway was made. The debate which goes by the name of "crisis in sociology" in India provides the backdrop against which the paper makes sense of current regimes of knowledge production that a doctoral candidate in India must navigate. By doing so, the paper reflects on the limitations of epistemological critiques wherein an epistemic critique stops at the corridors of an academic workplace. The paper argues that doctoral candidates in India today are cognitive workers engaged in exploitative relations of knowledge production. However, these exploitative relations are obfuscated by the postcolonial epistemological critiques that indulge in foregrounding the hegemony of the North / West. The paper proposes an infrastructural critique of knowledge that does not respond with despair to perceived transformations and crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ballot order positional effects, electoral advantage gained from a candidate's surname location on the ballot paper, have been extensively studied. For ‘low-information’ elections especially candidates located at or near the top of the ballot paper are advantaged relative to their competitors. This examination of alphabetic bias uses data from local council election results in Britain. The examination of election contests featuring more than half a million candidates provides evidence of an alphabetic bias which increases as the number of vacancies increases. We calibrate the effects upon votes and vote share of alphabetical ordering of candidates. Comparing votes cast for last- and first-placed candidates in the ballot order demonstrates a clear advantage to those placed first. This increases in size as both the number of seats and competing candidates increases. Those located in the top half of the ballot paper are more likely to finish in the top half of the vote order. Subsequently, the distribution of surnames among elected councillors is clustered towards the top of the alphabet. Measures could remove the effects of alphabetic bias, such as randomising name order and introducing experiments in local council electoral practice, a cost-effective means for evaluating change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1950, exiles from all across Latin America met in Havana for a congress. The event's purpose was to unite those striving for a democratic Latin America, free from US imperialism and Soviet totalitarianism. This current of opinion was not marginal: it was enthusiastically backed by millions of voters in largely free elections across the continent. However, very little has been written on democracy in Latin America, particularly during the period explored in this paper, 1940–1960. Recent scholarship on the period has instead focused on the ideological struggle between capitalism and socialism. In this paper, I highlight two democratic congresses held in Latin America in 1950 and 1960, under the title Conferencia Interamericana Pro Democracia y Libertad. The conferences served as a forum to delineate a common definition of democracy for the continent, and to explore how it could take hold in Latin America. This paper thus reveals an ideological current independent from the superpowers, which tried to democratise the region against what participants identified as the twin evils of imperialism and totalitarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does party system polarization mobilize voters? Polarization is increasingly shaping democratic competition across Europe. While often perceived to be negative, polarization can be an effective remedy against voter disengagement. This paper investigates two distinct, but often conflated mechanisms, which could explain why polarization leads to mobilization. Spatial polarization of parties diversifies electoral options at the ballot, while affective polarization mobilizes based on emotional considerations. This article then shows the link between polarization and turnout across 22 European countries. The results are complemented by a difference-in-differences analysis of German local elections. However, voting results alone do not inform about the mechanism at play. Survey data is used to show that negative affect appears to be the main driver of voter participation. Party polarization thus has ambivalent consequences for democracies: It mobilizes the electorate, but its effect is driven by negative emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we investigate who would vote 'none of the above' (NOTA) if this were available on the ballot paper using original data from eight European countries. In particular, we examine whether NOTA would be used by abstainers and voters to protest within the electoral process. We also test whether socioeconomic factors and specific and diffuse support for democracy and its institutions correlate with a NOTA vote. We find that having NOTA on the ballot would reduce invalid balloting more than abstention and much more than protest party voting. Our results also suggest that NOTA is related to socioeconomic status, political interest, political knowledge and distrust in political institutions and authorities, but not to broadly undemocratic attitudes. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the increasingly large amounts of abstention and invalid voting, as well as the growing distrust of political institutions, in democratic countries. They also hold lessons for electoral reformers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reassesses the claim that electronic voting systems help voters to avoid common mistakes that lead to their votes remaining uncounted. While prior studies have come to mixed conclusions, I provide new, more robust evidence based on a case study of extended Internet voting trials in Geneva canton, Switzerland. The trials almost exclusively involved referendum votes. For causal identification I exploit the unique circumstance that federal safety legislation created a near-natural experiment, with some of the canton's municipalities participating in the trials and others not. Using difference-in-differences estimation, I find that the residual vote rate decreased by an average of 0.3 percentage points if municipalities offered the possibility to vote online in addition to (mostly optically scanned) paper ballots. For cantonal measures, which are located towards the bottom of ballot papers in Geneva, the reduction increases to 0.5 percentage points. These remain relatively modest effects, and I find no evidence for a knock-on effect on electoral outcomes. However, on average only around 20% of votes were cast online where the opportunity existed, and online voting was most popular among voters with high levels of education. Despite the small effect sizes, the results of this study therefore point to the potential of Internet and, more generally, electronic voting technology to reduce avoidable voter mistakes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) has been marketed to "guarantee that the majority candidate is elected," to "eliminate the spoiler effect," and to empower voters, particularly those supporting third-party or independent candidates, to "vote your hopes, not your fears," which is meant to level the playing field between such candidates and those from the major-party duopoly. This paper shows that in Burlington Vermont, IRV objectively failed to deliver on these promises. However, this failure is not blamed on the use of ranked ballots, but rather on the Hare method of tallying the ballots and identifying the winner. To avoid the failure, this paper presents a variation on IRV, Bottom Two Runoff-IRV (BTR-IRV), including a template for possible legislative language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Using data from Politbarometer surveys and from local American elections in which voters ranked candidates, this paper estimates the frequencies with which different pairs of voting rules yield different outcomes from the same ballots. The frequencies vary widely over pairs of rules, from 0.39% for the pair Minimax and STAR to 24.41% for the pair Plurality and Approval. The paper also checked for Condorcet winners. There were Condorcet winners in all of the 115 elections examined and in all but one of the 1,022 surveys examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]