We describe a practical e-voting protocol which guarantees e-voting protocol requirements: eligibility, privacy, accuracy, fairness, receipt-freeness, uncoercibility, robustness and verifiability. Unlike existing blind signature based protocols, in which the authority blindly signs ballot or part of ballot, the authority in our protocol blindly signs voter’s pseudo identity. Hereafter, voter be...

The present paper studies the Hotelling-Downs and the Wittman-Roemer models of two-party competition when voter conformism is present and the policy space is uni-dimensional. We consider two types of voter conformism, bandwagon and underdog, and study their effects on political equilibrium of the two models. Even if voter conformism is present, the Hotelling-Downs parties propose an identical p...

This paper presents a novel technique for improved voting by adaptively varying the membership boundaries of a fuzzy voter to achieve realistic consensus among inputs of redundant modules of a fault tolerant system. We demonstrate that suggested dynamic membership partitioning minimizes the number of occurrences of incorrect outputs of a voter as compared to the fixed membership partitioning vo...

A considerable body of research focuses on why voter turnout changed — specifically, why it declined — in the 1960s and 1970s. Most models of the change focus on factors such as a decline in civic involvement or a shift in the age distribution toward younger citizens who vote less frequently. While these approaches have taught us much about voter turnout, they are puzzling in that none actually...

Only in recent years has the “likely voter” technology been extended to polls well in advance of an election. In the case of the 2000 U.S. presidential election, CNN/USA Today/Gallup tracking polls indicated considerable fluctuations in likely voter preferences, greater than among the larger pool of registered voters surveyed. This article explores how Gallup’s likely voter model exaggerates th...

This paper explores the causal influence of access to Western television programming on voting behavior. We exploit a natural experiment involving access to West German TV within the German Democratic Republic in which only geography and topography determined the allocation of individuals to treatment and control groups. Focusing on both the shares of extremist parties and voter turnout, we fin...

Why do people turn out to vote? By requiring coordination and by generating positive externalities on others while involving a private cost, turning out to vote resembles a public good contribution and is therefore subject to collective action problems. While this has been established theoretically, the empirical evidence is fraught with measurement and identification problems. We investigate w...

There has been much research in economics concerned with the factors affecting voter turnout. This research has so far ignored how the presence of children affects an individual’s propensity to vote. This paper shows that having young children decreases the likelihood of voting. Low income individuals are especially vulnerable to this increased cost of voting due to children, while higher incom...