Does campaign duration affect election outcomes? To date, this question has largely evaded political scientists, but it is reasonable to expect systematic links between campaign length and candidate performance in elections. We hypothesize that longer campaigns would help challengers' electoral fortunes, thereby curbing incumbency advantage and potentially boosting competitiveness in elections....

The November 2014 Australian State of Victoria election was the first statutory political election worldwide at State level which deployed an end-to-end verifiable electronic voting system in polling places. This was the first time blind voters have been able to cast a fully secret ballot in a verifiable way, and the first time a verifiable voting system has been used to collect remote votes in...

Prediction markets,1 which allow participants to place bets on the probability of a particular event, have been used with great success in the election context. Virtually ubiquitous during the 2008 election, prediction markets were used to forecast the chances of a particular candidate winning the election, and were often used by Internet pundits to keep “score” of the polls throughout the run-...

I consider a two-candidate plurality-rule election in which there is aggregate uncertainty about the popularity of each candidate, where voting is costly, and where participants are instrumentally motivated. The unique equilibrium predicts significant turnout under reasonable parameter configurations, and greater turnout for the underdog offsets the expected advantage of the perceived leader. I...

Data diodes, that is, devices which permit only one-way communication, without even a reverse channel for acknowledgment, have many potential uses within voting systems. A practical design for a data diode is presented that is simpler and more nearly self-evident than previously published designs. Communication protocols appropriate for use in the voting context are described. Throughout, we em...