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In response to the growing social discontent regarding what is perceived as generational injustice, due to younger generations of voters facing long-term negative consequences from issues disproportionately decided by the votes of older generations of voters, there have been suggestions to introduce an upper age voting threshold. These have been all but universally dismissed as offensive and contrary to basic democratic values. In the present article, I show that the idea is in fact entirely consonant with present-day democratic practices and far from without a precedent. Hence, I describe how the aforementioned generational injustice can be rectified using a simple vote-weighting scheme which is easy to implement and interpret. Lastly, I discuss the societal effects that this alteration of the voting system would have on the distribution of the origins of political power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the current research is to explain the desirable nature of parliament's transparency and its theoretical challenges in contemporary Iranian constitutional law based on the philosophical findings of modern law in relation to constitutional jurisprudence. The research method hired, has been qualitative and the analytical philosophy in contemporary law in response to how the right to transparency is made available, that believes the possibility of having enough information for four answers in the public domain is equal to guaranteeing transparency. Who are the decision makers? How are they chosen? Based on what principles do they make decisions? And the benefit of the decisions taken will be given to which group or people? Accordingly, in a completely transparent parliament, the following should be organized to guarantee these questions: transparency of processes and decision-making methods, transparency of priorities and policies, transparency of documents and reports, audio-visual and interactive access to the ballots of parliament members and technological access to data, transparency of properties and maintenance costs and the cost of human resources, financial transactions of members and administrative expenses, transparency regarding guests and current expenses, the cost of occasions, events and trips, transparency of members' information, transparency of parliamentary proceedings and complaints. Criticisms, in any other words, intellectual challenges that this philosophical level can be useful for legislative operations have been raised by some schools of public choice and behavioral economics, believing that: transparency causes people to move away from specialized decisions and get absorbed in the currents of interests and extreme populism. On the other hand, the implementation of transparency is very costly and of little use. The critical response to the mentioned challenge firstly, believes however, all political rights are very costly, in principle, its necessity for the society cannot be denied. On the other hand, although there is a possibility of extreme populism, transparency can be precisely opposed to the above-mentioned importance and prevent populism with the guarantees of the profession in the way it is implemented and based on its basic philosophical principles. In fact, the aforementioned criticism is meant more than a definite criticism in the prohibition of transparency but a clear attention to guaranteeing the dimensions of philosophical transparency. Also, for its function and purpose (regarding providing acceptability and legitimacy for political representation), the oath of allegiance is considered parallel to the theory of representation in public law, which is totally considered the basis of parliament in modern law. One of the essential requirements in the philosophy of Islamic law in the contract is the absence of jeopardy in the acts of guardianship, and the guardian is obliged to clarify the limits and quality of his expediency in the acts of guardianship. On the one hand, in the practice of governance in public affairs in Islam, observing the right and the rightness is one of the urgent and necessary matters that the Shariah is not satisfied with leaving it aside, and the rightness in the contract of guardianship is necessary for transparency in many cases, and therefore the philosophy of Islamic law can include the issue that Parliament should be transparent. On the other hand, the interpretive originalism considering the interpretation of the text of the constitution according to the opinion of the Constituent Assembly, shows by examining the text of the constitution that the constitution of the Islamic Republic also supports the issue of transparency. The result of the review of the provisions provided in the legal plan depicts that if they are approved, the Islamic Council will not be able to be transparent, and many transparency provisions in this plan have been left incomplete and neglected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized ledger of transactions that are linked together cryptographically leading to immutability and tamper-resistance, thereby ensuring the integrity of data. Due to the ability of blockchain to guarantee the integrity of data, it has found wide-range adoption in electronic voting (e-voting) systems in recent years, this is in a bid to prevent manipulation of votes. However, due to the distributed nature of the blockchain, opportunities arise for privacy intrusion of the data being secured. The translation of this privacy flaw in blockchain to e-voting systems is the possibility of violation of the privacy of the electorates. Consequently, in a bid to achieve integrity and privacy of votes in e-voting, this study presents the use of an open-source blockchain system, coupled with a privacy-oriented cryptosystem known as the Paillier cryptosystem, towards addressing the privacy concerns of the blockchain. The performance of the system was evaluated and a transaction throughput of 1424 tps was obtained for ten thousand simulated ballot transactions. Further evaluation was carried out on the system, by increasing the number of system transactions. This showed that the mining time of the blockchain increased by an average factor of 0.18 s for every thousand increases in the number of transactions. Also, the response time of the system to a range of user actions was evaluated over an increasing number of voters. Results obtained showed that the response time of the system for vote casting operations increased by an average of 0.33 min per thousand voters while for vote tallying there was an increase in response time by an average of 0.848 min per thousand voters. The scientific value of this study is the development of an integrity and privacy-preserving e-voting system consisting of an open-source nodechain coupled with a privacy-oriented cryptosystem known as the Paillier cryptosystem following the security requirements of e-voting systems. The proposed system addresses the issue of integrity in e-voting while still maintaining the privacy of the electorates.

In response to the growing social discontent regarding what is perceived as generational injustice, due to younger generations of voters facing long-term negative consequences from issues disproportionately decided by the votes of older generations of voters, there have been suggestions to introduce an upper age voting threshold. These have been all but universally dismissed as offensive and contrary to basic democratic values. In the present article, I show that the idea is in fact entirely consonant with present-day democratic practices and far from without a precedent. Hence, I describe how the aforementioned generational injustice can be rectified using a simple vote-weighting scheme which is easy to implement and interpret. Lastly, I discuss the societal effects that this alteration of the voting system would have on the distribution of the origins of political power.

During the pandemic, a large part of European countries had elections and referenda to organize, which required specific measures, from a postponement of the event to an extension of the postal ballots. As a common element, all the countries where elections were held witnessed low participation, the biggest challenge for the authorities being the participation to the vote of the quarantined individuals. We will see the way elections were handled in 11 European countries, except Romania. In all these countries one can assess a need for modifying electoral legislations.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the Better Know A Ballot initiative launched by Stephen Colbert to encourage voter registration and turnout in the 2020 Election, the research offers an in-depth analysis of Colbert's satirical interrogation of voting rules across the United States. In focusing on the nuances that come with a federalized system of voting, Colbert effectively revisits his role as satirical election educator-in-chief, producing digital YouTube video content that is designed to be shared by and engage his audience. Colbert's simultaneous satirical criticism of our election system and his call to get out the vote reflects a full circle return to playful participatory satire all the while offering an important mobilization tool for greater citizen engagement with technology and politics. Like recent efforts by other political satirists, Colbert's Better Know A Ballot series reflects an increasingly entertaining yet activist take on engagement with US electoral politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Local communities contribute to broader biodiversity protection goals when managing their immediate environment when they establish protected areas. However, their efforts are geographically constrained and often uncoordinated. We compare protected areas established by local communities through the direct democracy process in California, US, to protected areas created and managed by two conservation actors working over larger spatial scales, one private and one public. Despite being geographically constrained to smaller spatial scales, protected areas established by local communities were as effective as those established by larger scale conservation actors at representing different habitat types. However, local ballot protected areas tended to protect more common species. All three protected area networks often performed no better than random in terms of siting protected areas to support narrow range species and rare habitats. Improved accounting of local communities' protection efforts would allow organizations with greater funding flexibility to focus their efforts to increase representation of rarer species and habitats in protected area systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 2000 election, researchers have taken an interest in the role of voter confidence and its importance as an assessment of public trust in electoral outcomes. Many factors may influence voter confidence including the way in which a voter casts their ballot. Previous research has found that absentee voters consistently report the lowest levels of confidence that their votes were counted correctly. This study uses an experiment to examine how voting method impacts voter confidence. Voters were randomly assigned to either an in-person or absentee voting condition. Participants assigned to the absentee condition expressed lower levels of confidence that their votes would be counted correctly than those assigned to the in-person voting condition. Voters who had to ask for assistance during the experiment also reported lower levels of confidence. This could have implications for voter confidence levels nationally as vote-by-mail continues to grow in popularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic voting machines have replaced paper ballot systems, which were being used in early Indian elections. But, with the advancement of technology, a series of security issues have been raised regarding the present voting system, such as EVM tampering in order to register fraudulent votes. The proposed system attempts to solve the problem of bogus voting by introducing a multi-modal biometric authentication system. It makes the voting system more secure by using data encryption and firewalls to protect the voter database. It increases accessibility by allowing voters to cast their vote in the elections of their respective constituency from any polling booth across the country. It also increases transparency in the election process by notifying voters on successful ca sting of their vote. This paper proposes a Biometric Voting Machine with a robust system architecture that is able to withstand malicious attacks and fraudulent behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four aspects have been analyzed: i) the exemplification quantity ii) the presence of "deviant uses" in the exemplification, this is, a examples 'typologies' analysis, iii) the exemplification corpus and iv) the presence of examples in other languages. Because the grammars are written by the same person and were published in closest years, this information is trustworthier to observe how they affect the described languages' sociolinguistic situation and the aims established by the grammarian to the exemplification. Especially, a big differences can be perceived in those aspects related to the languages' sociohistorical situation: in the authorities' corpus that are used and in the examples' presence in other languages. There are also differences in the exemplification's amount used, but not in the exemples' typologies. Without a doubt, the previous gramatical tradition, the described language's sociolinguistic situation and the public to whom the grammar is addressed are essentials aspects that modify the grammatical example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polling location is the independent variable. To evaluate the priming effect on polling location, four dummy variables are generated: church, school, community building, and miscellaneous locations. Community buildings include fire departments, community centers, community halls, town halls, and public libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A blockchain is a distributed, digitized and consensus-based secure information storage mechanism. The present article provides an overview of blockchain based e-voting systems. The primary purpose of this review is to study the up-to-date state of blockchain-based voting research along with associated possible challenges while aiming to forecast future directions. The methodology applied in the review is a systematic review approach. Following an introduction to the basic structure and features of the blockchain in relation to e-voting, we provide a conceptual description of the desired blockchain-based e-voting application. Symmetrical and asymmetrical cryptography improvements play a key role in developing blockchain systems. We have extracted and reviewed 63 research papers from scientific databases that have advised the adoption of the blockchain framework to voting systems. These articles indicate that blockchain-supported voting systems may provide different solutions than traditional e-voting. We classified the main prevailing issues into the five following categories: general, integrity, coin-based, privacy and consensus. As a result of this research, it was determined that blockchain systems can provide solutions to certain problems that prevail in current election systems. On the other hand, privacy protection and transaction speed are most frequently emphasized problems in blockchain applications. Security of remote participation and scalability should be improved for sustainable blockchain based e-voting. It was concluded that frameworks needed enhancements in order to be used in voting systems due to these reservations.