A Leader is a Coordinator that supports a set of processes to cooperate a given task. This concept is used in several domains such as distributed systems, parallelism and cooperative support for cooperative work. In completely asynchronous systems, there is no solution for the election problem satisfying both of safety and liveness properties in asynchronous distributed systems. Therefore, to s...

Following the 1995 Russian parliamentary election, it was suggested that Russian voters may have used their votes to send a message to the then current Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, who was scheduled to run for reelection six months later. Building on this observation, we consider the incentives for information transmission through strategic voting in systems with sequential elections. We f...

Consensus protocols inherently rely on the notion of leader election, in which one or a subset of participants are temporarily elected to authorize and announce the network’s latest state. While leader election is a well studied problem, the rise of distributed ledgers (i.e., blockchains) has led to a new perspective on how to perform large-scale leader elections via solving a computationally d...

A time series (t=921) of weekly survey data on vote intentions in the Netherlands for the period 1978-1995 shows that the percentage of undecided voters follows a cyclical pattern over the election calendar. The otherwise substantial percentage of undecided voters decreases sharply in weeks leading up to an election and gradually increases afterwards. This paper models the dynamics of this asym...

Election surveys have several purposes, including forecasting election outcomes and studying the distribution of votes as they vary over geographic, demographic, and political variables. Bayesian methods can be useful in the design and analysis of election surveys, with the details depending on speciic features of the data collection and goals of inference. In many cases, the natural Bayesian a...

The 2000 presidential election was the most controversial U.S. election in recent history, mainly due to the disputed outcome of the election in Florida. Elsewhere in this issue, Richard Smith analyzes the high vote for Pat Buchanan in Palm Beach county. As background for his article, we summarize this and other voting-related issues that may have affected the outcome of the election in Florida...

Verifiability is an important component of elections. It is related to aspects like trust in the correctness of the election results, transparency of the election processes, and preparation for a possible contestation of the election. In particular the last aspect is of crucial importance in legally regulated elections. Verifiability in this context means that voting systems must be designed co...

Election data represent a precious source of information to study human behavior at a large scale. In proportional elections with open lists, the number of votes received by a candidate, rescaled by the average performance of all competitors in the same party list, has the same distribution regardless of the country and the year of the election. Here we provide the first thorough assessment of ...

This paper examines the impact of political uncertainty on financial crises using a panel of twenty-two emerging markets. By examining political election cycles, we find that eight out of nine of the financial crises happened during the periods of political election and transition. Using a combination of probit and switching regression analysis, we find that there is a significant relationship ...

We consider a continuous time model for election timing in a Majoritarian Parliamentary System where the government maintains a constitutional right to call an early election. Our model is based on the two-party-preferred data that measure the popularity of the government and the opposition over time. We describe the poll process by a Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) and use a martingale ...