In 2009 the German Federal Constitutional Court introduced the principle of “public nature of elections” (Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, March 2009). This principle requires that when using electronic voting systems it must be possible for the citizen to verify the essential steps in the election process and in the ascertainment of the results reliably and without special expert knowl...

It is generally considered that a key component of electronic government in the future will be electronic voting, as a means of facilitating the participation of citizens in elections and public debates. However, a long path has to be pursued before electronic voting, particularly if based on Internet, is accepted as a reliable system alternative to conventional methods. In this paper, we propo...

In this report we describe our efforts in analysing log files produced by the Estonian i-voting system in the KOV2013, EP2014 and RK2015 elections in combination with other information available, so as to detect attacks against the i-voting system, detect system malfunctions and study voter behaviour.

This study examines how state ownership of banks can have contributed to the ascending to power of Vladimir Putin during the presidential elections of March 2000. We analyze how firm loans granted by the dominating state-owned bank Sberbank can have influenced the outcome of these elections. We study the relation at the regional level and analyze the variation in Sberbank firm loans and the inc...

Remote electronic voting is currently being piloted in the UK as a means of increasing the convenience of casting a ballot, which it is hoped will be reflected in an increased participation in elections. Most proposed electronic voting schemes envisage the use of cryptography in order to model the features of democratic elections, which, informally, include notions such as the secret ballot and...

Using a new data set, we estimate the magnitude of the incumbency advantage in direct primary elections between 1910 to 2000. We ̄nd that the incumbency advantage, as estimated by the sophomore surge, was above 5 percentage points in primary elections even in the ̄rst decades of the twentieth century. The sophomore surge in primary elections grew to approximately 15 percentage points by the end...

This article investigates the impact of the election of community leaders in local communities (villages or suku) in Timor-Leste. After looking briefly at the impacts of suku elections on selected communities—particularly on community cohesion—and at some community responses to elections, the article discusses local capacities for managing the challenges to social order and cohesion that can fl...

We present Selections, a new cryptographic voting protocol that is end-to-end verifiable and suitable for Internet voting. After a one-time in-person registration, voters can cast ballots in an arbitrary number of elections. We say a system provides over-the-shoulder coercionresistance if a voter can undetectably avoid complying with an adversary that is present during the vote casting process....

The twin elections of 2012 in Greece had a manifest impact on the political scene of Greece and the European Union. In this paper we analyze the negotiations that took place after the May 06, 2012 and June 12, 2012 Parliamentary elections from a game-theoretic perspective. We model the different instances of the Parliament as weighted majority games and apply the Shapley-Shubik, Penrose-Banzhaf...

Hugo Chávez dominated the Venezuelan electoral landscape since his first presidential victory in 1998 until his death in 2013. Nobody doubts that he always received considerable voter support in the numerous elections held during his mandate. However, the integrity of the electoral system has come into question since the 2004 Presidential Recall Referendum. From then on, different sectors of so...