Judges face retention elections in over a third of U.S. state courts of last resort and numerous lower courts. According to conventional wisdom, these elections engender judicial independence and decrease democratic accountability. We argue that in the context of modern judicial campaigns, retention elections create pressure for judges to cater to public opinion on “hot-button” issues that are ...

Internet has found an increasing role in the politics, during the last decade. Today, terms like digital democracy, Internet elections, Internet advertisements (propaganda, social- political Web logging in the internet has become common terms.  Internet is getting replaced for the traditional media in politics. The interactive characteristic of this media has changed it to an unrivaled instrume...

Elections with small margins of victory represent an important form of electoral competition and, increasingly, an opportunity for causal inference. Scholars using regression discontinuity designs (RDD) have interpreted the winners of close elections as randomly separated from the losers, using marginal election results as an experimental assignment of office-holding to one candidate versus the...

Can electoral rules be designed to achieve political ideals such as accurate representation of voter preferences and accountable governments? The academic literature commonly divides electoral systems into two types, majoritarian and proportional, and implies a straightforward trade-off by which having more of an ideal that a majoritarian system provides means giving up an equal measure of what...

This study provides a proof-of-concept of a newly designed verifiable voting system. The implementation elicits details in the communication and synchronization among servers, unavailable in the original design paper [M. O. Rabin and R. L. Rivest, "Efficient End to End Verifiable Electronic Voting Employing Split Value Representations." in Proc. EVOTE ’14, Bregenz, Austria.]. The implemented sy...

Similar to Circadian, the moon, and sunspots, U.S. elections occur on a regular cycle. For those in the U.S. this is a natural part of a democracy. However, in other nations, national elections are not necessarily regularly scheduled. In Britain, for example, the prime minister requests the Queen to call elections at a time the P.M. believes is most political advantageous. It cannot be longer t...

The relationship between judicial elections and judicial independence is receiving considerable scrutiny today. This article examines the impact of elections on judicial independence from the perspective of voters, since it is voters’ choices that ultimately determine the electoral fates of incumbent judges. The research on voting in judicial elections helps in understanding the circumstances t...

We address various voting systems and types of control of elections and show how hard control problems can be modeled as integer programs. By means of the off-the-shelf solver Cplex we then demonstrate that the approach allows to treat the control of larger elections successfully. As a consequence, the hardness of a certain control problem is not a secure protection for the fraudulent falsifica...