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Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of a democratic system, but elections are common in other regimes as well. Such an election might be a pure farce, with the incumbents getting close to 100% of the vote. In other instances, incumbents allow opposition candidates to be on the ballot and run campaigns, limit electoral fraud, e.g., by inviting international observers, all to make elections appear fair. In our model, the incumbent is informed about his popularity, and having a fair election allows him to signal his popularity to the people. After casting their vote, heterogeneous citizens decide whether or not to participate in a protest, and they are more willing to do so if they expect others to protest as well. We demonstrate theoretically that regimes that have a high level of elite repression are less likely to have fair elections, but regimes with a high cost of protesting for ordinary citizens make fair elections more likely.

On March 27, 2008, Newsweek ran an article titled, “Obama’s Postracial Test: How will the Democratic Candidate Deal with Potentially Divisive Ballot Initiatives Calling for an End to Affirmative Action?” And, the August 6, 2008 issue of the New York Times Magazine featured an article titled, “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?” Since then, writers from the right and left have raised and challenged the idea that the election of Barack Obama somehow signals a new, post-racial era and presidency. But what does this mean for Hawaii? With its unique racial diversity and its connection to Obama, might Hawaii somehow represent the first post-racial state? And, does this mean anything for the way education is run in that state? In addressing these questions, this paper looks carefully at the Obama Administration’s recent education initiative called the Race to the Top Fund and examines its implications for education in Hawaii.

Across the post-World War II western liberal order, antidemocratic leaders have ascended to power through the ballot box and then engaged in an assault on prodemocratic norms. Commentators have worried that counter-normative behaviors will bring into existence a “new normal,” constructing an antidemocratic regimen in which future leaders will be freed to operate beyond either long-standing or newly created democratic expectations. In this article, I explore the matter of how and when incumbent leaders establish norms for future leaders. Normative leadership is typically presented as the capacity of leaders to set norms for the social units they are heading. Less examined but vital to the understanding of how leadership is enacted is the question of how prevailing norms create opportunities and limitations on the exercise of leadership. Leaders set norms not only just for their followers but also for future leaders. With particular attention to the norm breaking of Donald Trump in the United States, I examine a pattern of norm setting, norm breaking, and norm resetting that has unfolded at the presidential level. Whatever norms Trump, or any authoritarian leaders, may break during their incumbency, the setting of new norms will rely on a network of actors: not only just future leaders but also representatives of institutions (the courts, military, press, congress, etc.) as well as voters.

Since 1980, many have marveled at Los Angeles’“innovation” of funding transportation through ballot measures that are raising billions for transportation improvements. In fact, historically much transportation infrastructure in Los Angeles was financed by local voter-approved revenues. It began in 1868 with a narrowly approved $225,000 bond measure to build the region’s first railroad, followed by an 1876 measure to grant the Southern Pacific railroad a $602,000 subsidy to entice the company to route its transcontinental line through the region. Angeleno voted on an additional 23 different transportation-related ballot measures between the passage of the Good Roads Act (1908) and the end of the New Deal (1937)—a key period of Los Angeles’ history that saw dramatic population increase and with it political contention over the direction of the region’s growth. Overall, these early transportation measures fared well with voters. Of the 25 transportation-related ballot measures in Los Angeles County from 1860 to 1960, only seven (28%) failed to pass, a far better record than nontransportation measures of which 21 of 31 (71%) went down to defeat. Regardless of whether, as some contend, Los Angeles missed a golden opportunity to create the backbone of an effective transit system that would have reduced the need for automobiles and spending many billions on freeways, it is clear that local voters have long faced competing visions for the future of Los Angeles and arguments over whether to fund transportation systems to serve these visions.

Marketing orders allow farmers to collectively fund industry-wide services that may be difficult to provide through a voluntary approach. But not all farmers support collective approaches. We employed ballot data from U.S. Department of Agriculture and survey data we collected to explore why farmers in California voted to terminate the federal fresh peach and nectarine marketing orders in 2011 and the implications of this termination. Even after controlling for other factors, we found that farmers who produced more were significantly less likely to vote for continuation. We also found that detailed industry information provided via the marketing orders was significantly more important to respondents voting for continuation, and respondents with more organic production were significantly more likely to vote for continuation. These results suggest farmers may have lost important production and marketing resources due to termination of the orders, with evidence that smaller farms were more affected. This termination may thus have accelerated the exit of farmers from this industry.

In most electronic voting schemes, a voter signs his/her ballot using a digital signature algorithm before submission to ensure that the ballot is generated by himself/herself, which results that the workload of the verification process in ballot tallying increases with the number of voters and candidates. In this paper we present a new electronic voting scheme, HSE-voting, to lighten the workload of tallying. The cryptographic approach of this scheme is homomorphic signcryption, whose signature homomorphism enables that the number of signature verifications depends on the number of candidates only, and the encryption homomorphism keeps ballots from being decrypted during the tallying process. Moreover, for voters, the encryption and signature of ballots can be completed in one step using the homomorphic signcryption. Finally, this paper gives proofs for the privacy of voters and the security and verifiability of voting, and provides a comparative analysis with the latest scheme.

Indonesia is a country that applies a democratic political system. One of the means of the democratic political system in Indonesia is the General Election. The implementation of a democratic election should be carried out in accordance with the election principles abided by Indonesia, namely Luber-Jurdil (Direct, General, Free, Confidential, Honest, Fair). In order for the principle of Luber-Jurdil to be carried out, supervisions are requireds. Supervision is not only carried out by Panwaslu (General Election Supervisory Agency), the public also have to play a role in that supervision. The public can monitor, either directly or indirectly, the process of running a democracy / elections. The results of the current study show that there were several causes of abstention in the last 2018 elections, namely: 1) Internal factors which include technical factor and occupational factor, 2). External factors which include administrative factor, and political factor. There are also solutions to reduce the number of abstentions for the next election by easing the rules for voters to be able to vote, improving the data collection and voter registration system so that it has fresher outlook (requires adequate personnel and budget support), changing the right to vote into an obligation to vote. The electoral system must be very easy for voters to understand (for example, easy voting procedures, simple ballot paper design). For those solutions, it is necessary to involve strategic groups, such as first-time voters, religious people, women, people with disabilities and marginalized groups.

Voters’ punishment of corrupt politicians at the ballot box is oftentimes modest, at best. Recent studies suggest that this minor electoral sanctioning is due to limited corruption information and ...

It was chaired by K. F. Slavyanskiy.72 members attended.1) According to 9 of the Charter of the Society, elections were held to the members of the Board for the next two years of 1894-1895. By a closed ballot, from the ones proposed by the preliminary notes, they were elected: the Chairpersons of the Society D. Ott, in the Companions of the President - V. II. Stolz. Unanimously, per acclamatione, and following the refusal of others proposed from the ballot, the following were elected: LG Lichkus as secretaries and N. I. Stravinsky. A.P. Zabolotskiy was elected librarians.

We develop a new framework to study legislative representation in list proportional representation (PR) systems. Our model studies a legislator’s incentives to balance the competing interests of party leaders and local voters under a variety of list PR systems. We consider open and closed lists, as well as flexible lists—in which both rank assignments and preference votes determine the order in which seats are filled. We find that more flexibility can worsen local representation. List flexibility also acts as a key mediator of the effect of voter partisanship on party cohesion. And, our analysis reveals that higher district magnitude encourages representatives to toe the party line under all ballot systems.

Whether hailed for transitioning to the ballot box, or condemned for failing to hold elections, Africa’s postcolonial states exhibit profound contradictions in the arena of gender politics. Where reforms have been achieved, implementation remains minimal, as undemocratic state structures and uncivil societies alike lack the political will to change. This article addresses the emergence of feminism as an intellectual and political force for freedom that radically challenges the ongoing exploitation and oppression of women in Africa. It focuses on the contribution of radical intellectuals to the theory and practice of women’s movements, arguing that the research, analysis, and activism they carry out defines them as a radical public intellectual cadre that continuously mobilizes with, by, and for women to pursue liberation for themselves as much as others.

California processes more votes by mail than any other state. Though many states have increased the number of ways that voters can cast a ballot in recent years, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic ...

The complexity of U.S. elections usually requires computers to count ballots—but computers can be hacked, so election integrity requires a voting system in which paper ballots can be recounted by h...

The COVID-19 pandemic and its concomitant need for social distancing have increased the attractiveness of voting by mail. This form of voting is nonetheless not a panacea for election administratio...

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 ...

This study compares stem cell research policymaking by legislators and citizens in the United States. First, using exit poll results from a 2006 stem cell research initiative in Missouri, the study finds that deeply held personal values such as religious beliefs and views of abortion predominate in an individual’s voting decision on this issue; second, an analysis of voting behavior by senators on the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005 finds that senators make their voting decisions based on their personal policy preferences rather than their constituents’ preferences; and third, the complexity of the Missouri citizen initiative is compared with that of the legislation in the U.S. Senate, finding that the language of the citizen initiative is more sophisticated than the language of the legislative act. These findings provide the context for a broader discussion of the role of citizens and legislators in making policy for science.

Public decision‐makers increasingly rely on satisfaction surveys to inform budget and policy decisions. Yet, our knowledge of whether, and under what conditions, this input from public service users provides valid performance information remains incomplete. Using a preregistered split‐ballot experiment among government grant recipients in Denmark, this article shows that the ordering of survey questions can bias satisfaction measures even for highly experienced and professional respondents. We find that asking about overall satisfaction before any specific service ratings lowers overall user satisfaction, compared to the reverse order, while the correlations between specific ratings and overall satisfaction are relatively stable. Also, the question order effect outweighs that of a large‐scale embezzlement scandal, which unexpectedly hit the investigated government agency during the data collection. Our results support rising concerns that subjective performance indicators are susceptible to bias. We discuss how practitioners should approach satisfaction surveys to account for the risk of question order bias.

The nature of American constitutional politics was forever changed during the Progressive Era. In the nineteenth century, the process of constitutional interpretation was a vague and decentralized enterprise balanced between the courts and the public square. The meaning of the Constitution was decided as much at the polls or on the battlefield as in court opinions. This balance started to give way at the turn of the century as federal courts began asserting greater authority in the definition of constitutional bounds. “Bench over Ballot” illustrates how the assertion of judicial supremacy in the Progressive Era precipitated a fight that upended the traditional dynamic of American politics. Populist-progressives championed the people's ultimate right to correct judicial decisions while traditionalist-conservatives stood for judicial supremacy to ensure a “government of laws.” The outcome of the political battle in 1912 was a consensus between Wilsonian progressives and Taftian conservatives in favor of judicial supremacy that banished the notion of popular supremacy and transformed the nature of constitutional politics from a popular, decentralized process to a vicious battle over the personal composition of the bench—a phenomenon deeply familiar over a century later.

Extract ----- Abstract Social media, and Twitter in particular, are playing an increasing role in the day-to-day activities of politicians (Weber Shandwick, 2014). Before the digital revolution, the relationship between the politician and the voter was intermediated by journalists and broadcast media. In contrast to traditional media, social media are presumed to enable politicians to engage directly with the electorate (Kruikemeier, Van Noort, Vliegenthart & De Vreese, 2015). In the last decade, there was a growing interest in the role of social media in election campaigns, triggered by Barack Obama’s electoral presidential election victory in 2008 and more recently by Donald Trumps’ triumph in 2016 (Rodriguez-Andres, 2018). The research presented in this article answers three main questions. First, who are the politicians using Twitter for campaigning purposes and what variables can predict Twitter use? Second, when do Belgian politicians use it and with which frequency? And third: do tweeting politicians perform better at the ballot box? The main findings reveal that a Flemish candidate has a higher probability of 18,7% to be present on Twitter compared to a candidate from the French community. Another important finding is that there is no significant association between the number of tweets and number of preferential votes, although a trend towards significance was observed for Flemish politicians. Keywords: Twitter, social media, elections, Belgium, political communication ----- Bibliography: De Munter, Stephanie/De Vries, Philippe: To Tweet or not to Tweet? An analysis of Twitter use during the 2014 Belgian elections, PCS – Politics, Culture and Socialization, 1+2-2017, pp. 107-123.

Do (many) voters like ranking? We address this question through an experimental study performed in four countries: Austria, England, Ireland and Sweden. Respondents were invited to participate in three successive elections. They were randomly assigned to one of four possible voting scenarios and asked to vote. The voting scenarios differed in terms of party supply (three or five parties) and the type of vote choice (vote for one party only or possibility of ranking all parties). After they had voted, respondents were asked about their satisfaction with the party supply and the voting system (using a scale from 0 “not at all satisfied” to 10 “very much satisfied”). We find little difference in overall satisfaction between those elections where people could rank order the parties and those where they could not.

Research on clientelism emphasizes the use of brokers to mobilize voters. To utilize these agents efficiently, politicians must learn about brokers’ relative abilities and allocate scarce resources accordingly. Drawing upon a hand-coded dataset based on the archives of Gustavo Capanema, a powerful mid-twentieth-century congressman from Minas Gerais, Brazil, this paper offers the first direct evidence of such learning dynamics. The analysis concentrates on Brazil’s pre-secret ballot era, a time when measuring broker performance was particularly straightforward. Consistent with theories of political learning, the data demonstrate that resource flows to local machines were contingent on the deviation between actual and expected votes received in previous elections. Moreover, given politicians’ ability to discern mobilization capacity, payments to brokers were highly effective in bringing out the vote.

American voters commonly express abstract support for candidates with a business background, yet there is minimal systematic evidence about whether it advantages candidates in actual electoral contests. We examine this question using observational data, drawing on a California law allowing candidates to designate their occupational background on the ballot, and experimental data. Candidates with a business background are prevalent in California. However, neither of our studies indicate that business candidates enjoy atypical overall electoral success (although Republican leaning constituencies have a notably more favorable view of such candidates). A political background predicts electoral success far more effectively. Further, “small business owners” have more success than other business candidates, suggesting that voters consider the specifics of a candidate’s business experience. These results advance our knowledge of decision making in low-information elections, how voters weigh private-sector versus political experience, and how they filter occupational information through a partisan lens.

Esta investigación es un aporte a los estudios sobre el voto femenino en Costa Rica, mediante el análisis de las peticiones de la Liga Feminista y de otras mujeres, los discursos pronunciados entre 1948-1952 en periódicos y en las actas de la Asamblea Legislativa. Se encontró que en las peticiones se hace énfasis en las capacidades de la mujer y en las discusiones de aprobación se referían a su imagen romántica, estereotipada e inocente. Una vez aprobado el voto, se valida a la mujer como sujeto de decisión en las urnas.

This article examines Malcolm X’s 1964 speech titled the “Ballot or the Bullet.” He used both managerial and confrontational rhetoric in this text; however, Malcolm X’s background, the events preceding the speech, the themes Malcolm X used, and the pattern of the speech has led many people over the years to believe the rhetoric Malcolm X produced here was confrontational. Nevertheless, this work argues that this speech was overall managerial and that some of the ideas expressed in this speech are being used widely by people today on both sides of the political spectrum.

One political barrier to climate reforms is the temporal mismatch between short-term policy costs and long-term policy benefits. Will public support for climate reforms increase as climate-related disasters make the short-term costs of inaction more salient? Leveraging variation in the timing of Californian wildfires, we evaluate how exposure to a climate-related hazard influences political behavior rather than self-reported attitudes or behavioral intentions. We show that wildfires increased support for costly, climate-related ballot measures by 5 to 6 percentage points for those living within 5 kilometers of a recent wildfire, decaying to near zero beyond a distance of 15 kilometers. This effect is concentrated in Democratic-voting areas, and it is nearly zero in Republican-dominated areas. We conclude that experienced climate threats can enhance willingness-to-act but largely in places where voters are known to believe in climate change.

If politicians believe they will be rewarded for responsive behaviour at the ballot and punished for the opposite, they are disciplined to follow-up on the public’s desires. That the treat of electoral accountability prompts re-election minded politicians to act in line with the public’s wishes, vitally hinges on the assumption that politicians feel monitored in the first place. To tunderstand how this precondition for anticipatory representation works in reality, this article examines politicians’ perceptions of voters awareness of party initiatives and parliamentary questions. Quantitative and qualitative survey evidence collected among Belgian Members of Parliament (N = 164) shows that politicians consider citizens as rather uninformed about politics but, paradoxically, believe that some of them are aware of specific party initiatives and oral questions. Evidence on citizens’ actual knowledge shows that politicians strongly overestimate voter awareness. Why is that? From their reflections, we learn that MPs overgeneralise feedback they receive from engaged citizens, leaving them with a biased image of how aware voters actually are. Also, the exceptionally of gaining visibility with their work causes politicians to overestimate the scope of awareness when they are covered in the media, receive reactions on their social media accounts or simply work on salient topics.

This paper looks at the development of an electoral gender gap over time, using, for the first time, actual ballot data collected in the Austrian state of Vienna. Vienna recorded female and male ballots separately in the years from 1954 to 1991. Firstly, using this unique design, we conclude that the traditional gender gap (males more left-leaning) existed up to 1969 and then changed into the modern gender gap (females more left-leaning), from that date. These results confirm the considerable literature based on survey data. As an alternative explanation for the observed pattern we explore the gender gap in voting for the central vs the flank parties. We can confirm survey-based findings that male voters support more extreme positions than female voters, and link this observation to the “social-harmony” gender gap.

States have increasingly used ballot initiatives to legislate education policy in recent years, although the consequences for educational equity and justice have been underexamined. This article investigates the extent to which ballot initiatives disproportionately affect traditionally minoritized students, with particular attention to two phenomena: tyranny of the majority and racial threat hypothesis. Results across models consistently find that minority-targeted education initiatives pass at significantly higher rates than those that do not target minoritized students, and they garner considerably more yes votes regardless of passage. For states with more people of color, this effect is magnified, suggesting the potential for tyranny of the majority may increase when there are greater proportions of people of color within a state. This research contributes to the body of literature regarding the impact of state-level policy on education and sheds light on the benefits and potentially negative consequences of the ballot initiative process as an education policy making tool, particularly for our nation’s most disadvantaged students.

Kalimantan Evangelical Church abbreviated as GKE is a Protestant church organization in Kalimantan. In political election, the potential of GKE is highly regarded as political ballot storage. The concurrent election of legislative and President in 2019 especially by the candidates for the parliament in Central Kalimantan pushed GKE into political attitudes and actions. How the political behavior of the GKE towards legislative candidates would like to be a big question in this discussion. Quantitative and qualitative research method was used to collect information or research data by involving a questionnaire technique that distributed online and in-depth interviews. The result shows that the GKE is not only involved to encourage congregations to use political rights and actively participated in the voting activities, but also actively encouraging the congregations through recommendation letter, promoting legislative candidates from GKE and mobilizing the potential of GKE resources to collect supports from the congregation.

Significance In response to COVID-19, many scholars and policy makers are urging the United States to expand voting-by-mail programs to safeguard the electoral process, but there are concerns that such a policy could favor one party over the other. We estimate the effects of universal vote-by-mail, a policy under which every voter is mailed a ballot in advance of the election, on partisan election outcomes. We find that universal vote-by-mail does not affect either party’s share of turnout or either party’s vote share. These conclusions support the conventional wisdom of election administration experts and contradict many popular claims in the media. Our results imply that the partisan outcomes of vote-by-mail elections closely resemble in-person elections, at least in normal times., In response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), many scholars and policy makers are urging the United States to expand voting-by-mail programs to safeguard the electoral process. What are the effects of vote-by-mail? In this paper, we provide a comprehensive design-based analysis of the effect of universal vote-by-mail—a policy under which every voter is mailed a ballot in advance of the election—on electoral outcomes. We collect data from 1996 to 2018 on all three US states that implemented universal vote-by-mail in a staggered fashion across counties, allowing us to use a difference-in-differences design at the county level to estimate causal effects. We find that 1) universal vote-by-mail does not appear to affect either party’s share of turnout, 2) universal vote-by-mail does not appear to increase either party’s vote share, and 3) universal vote-by-mail modestly increases overall average turnout rates, in line with previous estimates. All three conclusions support the conventional wisdom of election administration experts and contradict many popular claims in the media.

Democracy is a miracle or understanding that puts the foundations of togetherness and honesty and democracy make all people have their existence and becomes meaningful for society to maintain the diversity that does not divide people between the rich and poor. the strong with the weak. and the smart with fools. And democracy also does not recognize discrimination even if there is a difference in society and country and democracy gives similarities. This writing uses normative legal research methods (normative research) with descriptive-analytical research specifications that use secondary data. Data collection procedures are in the form of documentation of notes or quotations. a search of legal literature. books and others related to the identification of problems both offline and online which are then analyzed using the legislative approach through content analysis methods (content analysis method) with a focus on the issue of How is criminal liability for the perpetrators of the destruction of the ballot paper in legislative elections? From the results of the study note that criminal liability for the perpetrators of the destruction of the ballot paper in the legislative election is convicted in accordance with the provisions of the law that is passed and carried out by enforcing the regulations that have been made through the application of the criminal

How does ethnic diversity within a jurisdiction impact residents’ demand for local public goods? This question is central to the literature on diversity and local spending but remains relatively untested. To fill this gap, we study outcomes from California school district ballot measures to increase school funding. We use an instrumental variable approach to account for endogeneity in diversity. We find no evidence that diversity impacts willingness to be taxed to fund local schools. Our findings suggest that the negative effects of diversity on spending may be occurring through other channels, such as the decision-making of local officials.

The end-to-end (E2E) verification enables a voter to check if his ballot is recorded as he intended and the public to check if the system has correctly counted all of the recorded ballots. The Internet voting systems based on the principle of E2E verifiability have many challenges; the most important is its security. Several E2E voting systems have been discussed in the last decade in terms of analyzing the e-voting system and formalizing its security requirements. This article presents an E2E verifiable internet voting system that provides mobility to a voter and allows him to cast his vote secretly in public computer with the benefit of early voting. The proposed system aims to support the election process universally by using the voter's unique identification and biometric features. We propose a new identity-based blind signature scheme that ensures the voter's anonymity. We adopt the Boneh–Lynn–Shacham short signature scheme that ensures the vote privacy with the least ballot size. The system provides a digital witness to a voter that enables him to check whether his vote is recorded as he meant and the public to check if all the recorded ballots are counted correctly. The privacy of the proposed system is achieved under the well-known elliptic curve discrete logarithm and gap Diffie–Hellman assumptions.

Cannabis is traversing an extraordinary journey from an illicit substance to a legal one, due in part to an unprecedented wave of bottom-up law reform through successful citizen ballot initiatives. Yet, even in states that have legalized recreational cannabis, there is substantial geographic variability in support of cannabis legalization. Geographic variability in voter support for cannabis legalization is impactful (e.g., county moratoriums/bans) yet poorly understood. This paper demonstrates the consequences of county-level population demographics, sociopolitical factors, and community differences in experience with criminalization of cannabis possession for understanding county-level variation in support of recreational cannabis law reform on (un)successful ballot measures in California (2010), Colorado (2012), Washington (2012), and Oregon (2014). OLS regression analyses of nearly 200 counties indicate that differences in racial and ethnic composition (% Black, Hispanic), political affiliation (% Republican), past criminalization, gender composition, and higher education level of residents all predict county-level variation in support for liberalization of cannabis law. Stronger Republican political leanings and/or higher percentages of Black or Hispanic residents were associated with reduced support, whereas higher education, male sex composition, and greater past criminalization were associated with increased support for cannabis legalization across counties. Religiosity and rurality were inconsequential as predictors of county-level voting patterns favoring recreational cannabis. The substantial geographic variability in voter support for cannabis legalization has significant implications for policy implementation and effectiveness.

Street-level bureaucrats set the terms for policy implementation and often operate under limited oversight. In American elections, poll workers are the street-level bureaucrats tasked with implementing a jurisdiction’s laws for verifying voter eligibility. Using in-depth interviews with 24 poll workers from the city of Chicago, this article assesses how poll workers make decisions about voter eligibility under Illinois’ signature-matching law. Respondents discussed a range of considerations used when they examine voter eligibility. The evidence I present suggests they rely on personal perspectives and experiences in their evaluations. Respondents also offered a range of responses for how they would proceed in the instance of a mismatching signature—including requesting voters provide identification even though it is not a requirement in Illinois unless a voter is challenged. Broadly, these results illustrate how poll workers’ subjective interpretations of election law shape their decisions and can lead to idiosyncratic applications of election law.

This study empirically examines the outcomes of two solar energy amendments that were on the ballot in Florida in 2016. One amendment exempts solar energy devices from ad valorem taxation, effectiv...

While numerous studies have examined the effect of a co-ethnic candidate on the ballot for African Americans and Latinos, Asian Americans remain understudied in this regard. With the growth of Asian American voters nationwide, empirical questions prevail: Does the presence of an Asian American candidate on the ballot spur Asian American turnout or like other minority communities, is the demographic composition of a district the central mobilizing mechanism? Can we expect country of origin subgroups of Asian Americans such as Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Japanese, and Korean Americans voters to mobilize or does such cohesion not exist? Using surname-matched vote returns from the California state assembly across four election years, I examine the constraints and opportunities for pan-ethnic and national origin Asian American turnout in the presence of a co-ethnic candidate. I find that Asian American candidates have a measurable increase on pan-ethnic turnout, but conditional on the percentage of Asian Americans in the district. Across national origin groups, the effect of a co-ethnic candidate varies. The findings suggest Asian American voting behavior is highly nuanced and markedly distinct from other minority voters.

How do central politicians in young democracies secure electoral support at grass-roots level? I show that alignment with local governments is instrumental in swaying national elections via electoral fraud. Using a regression discontinuity design with Romanian local elections and a president impeachment referendum in 2012, I find higher referendum turnouts in localities aligned with the government coalition - the impeachment initiators. A variety of electoral forensics tests uncover abnormal vote count distributions across polling stations, consistent with null ballot stuffing and possibly vote buying. The alignment effect is driven by rural localities, those with weaker opposition party presence, and higher vote buying incidence in past elections. This illicit transfer from local to national government may explain the reverse clientelistic grants found in the intergovernmental transfers literature.

Statistical methods are developed for assessing the likelihood of prejudicial bias in agent-assigned permutations, such as the ordering of candidates on an election ballot. The null hypothesis of an unbiased order assignment is represented by several forms of probabilistic exchangeability of the random orderings, while bias is represented either by compatibility with an assumed ranking of the items with respect to a hypothesized preference criterion (PC) or by linear concordance with assumed scores of the items on a PC scale. A power analysis indicates the superiority of these methods to a neutral alternative when appropriate a priori information is available; their usefulness is affirmed in an application to the ordering of candidates on 2014 Texas Republican primary election ballots. Significant evidence of bias is found in three of the five races studied, a finding that does not obtain using currently available tests.

Student council election is a routine school activity every year, but currently the student council election is done manually using ballot papers containing the candidates. The weakness of this system is in addition to the process of getting longer results, it is also prone to fraud due to the excess of manipulated ballot papers, as well as being less environmentally friendly. Therefore the need for a system that is able to provide solutions to these problems, one of which is a responsive web-based student council election system. Web-based systems are more common than mobile-based systems, because they are supported by all device platforms, different if only based on mobile (Android), only devices based on the Android operating system can use the application. Moreover, web technology is now very good, responsive web allows the display of web pages to adjust to the user's screen size automatically, responsive web framework used in this study is bootstrap. In this study, researchers used a software development model which is a prototype. And for the tools used in developing this application is the Unified Modeling Language, and the system testing method uses a blackbox. The results of this study are expected to provide results in the form of a system that is fast and accurate, cost effective and environmentally friendly. Keywords: e-voting, bootstrap, prototype

Objective We seek to examine how individual factors such as information and political sophistication can affect the likelihood of a voter completing his or her ballot. Methods Through the use of an original experiment, we examine the individual‐level effects of information and political sophistication on ballot completion. Results We find that having less information about the candidates on a ballot results in lower levels of ballot completion. On average, voters complete 19 percent less of their ballot when they possess low levels of information about the candidates involved. Moreover, there are significant differences in how political sophisticates and nonsophisticates respond to deficiencies in candidate information. Conclusion Even though voters are likely to be hesitant to make a decision for a ballot contest when they are lacking in information, political sophisticates are more comfortable making a voting choice than nonsophisticates, even when they are operating under the exact same information constraints.

Recent studies document the increasing effectiveness of shareholder voting as a monitoring mechanism. Because both directors and the market respond to shareholder votes, management has stronger incentives to influence voting outcomes. We identify one channel through which management can affect voting outcomes: increasing the turnout of (typically management-friendly) retail shareholders. Our study focuses on an observable managerial choice of how to deliver proxy materials to maximize retail turnout. Management can opt to send a full set of proxy materials to all shareholders, which increases retail turnout but also increases printing and mailing costs, or they can send a notice directing shareholders to proxy materials available online, which reduces costs but also decreases retail turnout. We find that managers are more likely to choose to deliver a full set of proxy materials when there are contentious items on the ballot for which they need additional voting support; and, indeed, the resulting support increases the likelihood that voting outcomes will align with management recommendations. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting.

Popular consent is an essential element for success and stability of democracies. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that “electoral winners” (i.e. voters casting a ballot for government parties) are more satisfied with democracy than supporters of the opposition parties. However, little is known about the dynamics of satisfaction during the electoral cycle: Do winners become happier and losers even more discontent over time? We approach this question by utilizing an interview date in the European Social Survey (rounds 1–8) to position individuals within the different stages of electoral cycle. The results based on 199,207 responses from 199 surveys in 31 countries suggest that satisfaction with democracy stays relatively stable during the electoral cycle across various electoral systems if the political development is predictable. However, if actions of the parties are uncertain, namely the alternations of governments tend to be frequent, partial, and opened to all parties, and hence neither winners nor losers know how steady their status is with respect to the political development in the country, their satisfaction tend to fluctuate over time. Therefore, the conclusion reached is the more stable West European democracies have limited generalizability to the low-predictable systems in Central and Eastern Europe. Popular consent is an essential element for success and stability of democracies. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that “electoral winners” (i.e. voters casting a ballot for government parties) are more satisfied with democracy than supporters of the opposition parties. However, little is known about the dynamics of satisfaction during the electoral cycle: Do winners become happier and losers even more discontent over time? We approach this question by utilizing an interview date in the European Social Survey (rounds 1–8) to position individuals within the different stages of electoral cycle. The results based on 199,207 responses from 199 surveys in 31 countries suggest that satisfaction with democracy stays relatively stable during the electoral cycle across various electoral systems if the political development is predictable. However, if actions of the parties are uncertain, namely the alternations of governments tend to be frequent, partial, and opened to all parties, and hence neither winners nor losers know how steady their status is with respect to the political development in the country, their satisfaction tend to fluctuate over time. Therefore, the conclusion reached is the more stable West European democracies have limited generalizability to the low-predictable systems in Central and Eastern Europe.

Members of parliament are key actors for the implementation of energy transitions, such as phasing out nuclear power. Before legislators can cast their maybe decisive vote in parliament, they need to run for office and actively strive for election. This paper assesses what political candidates oppose renewable energy transitions and questions whether the energy issue matters in national elections, and thus has consequences for the implementation of new sustainable energy sources. We analyze these questions by first describing the specific characteristics of political candidates. The paper then evaluates the relevance of the energy issue for electoral success in three national elections in Switzerland (2007, 2012, and 2015). Based on candidate data from the voting advice application smartvote.ch, we find that female candidates support ETs more than men do; that especially the French-speaking part of the country is more in favor of a nuclear phase-out, and that younger candidates are also more open toward restructuring the energy system than older candidates are. Our models further show that the energy issue does not matter in elections, independently from its salience in the respective election campaigns. Candidates are thus relatively free to choose their position on the issue and do not have to fear consequences at the ballot. However, candidates of center parties, in contrast to the pole parties, are sensitive to the energy issue and reflect public mood in their positions.

This paper investigated the reflections of Electoral Commission (EC) officers and voters in the Jaman South District with regard to ballot paper wastage in elections in Ghana using descriptive exploratory research design. Purposive and convenience sampling techniques were used to select 172 respondents for the study with questionnaires, structured interview and interview guide as the research instruments. The study revealed that elections were conducted to help select leaders for the nation and to help ensure that leaders are accountable to the people. Policies and ideologies of candidates were found to have little influence on how persons vote. Factors such as protest voting, low public education on elections, and high level of illiteracy were responsible for rejected ballots in the district. Rejected ballot paper was a cost to the EC officers and the voters in terms of resources, time and energy especially during periods of run-offs. The study recommended that the government effectively collaborate with the EC officials in the district to implement policies that will increase voters’ appreciation of issues underpinning democracy. The EC officers in the district should properly collaborate with the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) to provide adequate public education to enable the electorates in the district to have a proper understanding of basic electoral issues.Key words: Elections; democracy; democratization; disenfranchisement; rejected ballots.

The 2016 EU referendum was a key moment in the history of the United Kingdom. It has changed the course of the country and continues to shape political competition in the UK. Despite research on which voters cast their ballot for Leave having become a minor industry in recent years, we still know little about what factors motivated our politicians to do so. Using original data from the 2016 Welsh Candidate Study, this article explains support for Brexit among parliamentary candidates in Wales. It finds that both candidates’ socio-economic profile and political attitudes influenced their decision to vote Leave in 2016. The strongest determinants of Leave vote were candidates’ views on how the EU works; how democratic it is and how much influence it can exert. Candidates’ occupational background and policy concerns were also relevant, but their effects were slightly weaker. These findings not only highlight that there are important similarities between what influenced politicians and voters to cast their ballot for Leave, but also some salient differences.

Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), state governments play a central role in deciding whether millions of low-income Americans have access to Medicaid. During the early years of ACA implementation, conservative opposition stalled the expansion of eligibility for Medicaid in many Republican-controlled states, even in the face of strong fiscal incentives. Can any forces overcome this partisan divide? In this article we consider the role of several key mechanisms that have affected Medicaid expansion over the past decade, including electoral competition, ballot-box initiatives, interest-group coalitions, and entrepreneurial administrators. While each mechanism has helped place Medicaid expansion on the agenda, they have done so unevenly. In Republican-controlled states where electoral competition is weak and ballot initiatives are unavailable, Medicaid expansion remains unlikely. Even when expansion is successful at the ballot box, however, state legislatures and governors have been able to delay or reverse voter-led initiatives. Moreover, the highly salient and partisan nature of Medicaid expansion has made it difficult for interest-group coalitions and progressive administrators to play a leading role in policy change. The future of Medicaid expansion, as well as other significant portions of the ACA, will continue to depend on the character of representative democracy in the states.