Control and bribery are settings in which an external agent seeks to influence the outcome of an election. Constructive control of elections refers to attempts by an agent to, via such actions as addition/deletion/partition of candidates or voters, ensure that a given candidate wins. Destructive control refers to attempts by an agent to, via the same actions, preclude a given candidate’s victor...

Electronic voting systems are being introduced, or trialled, in several countries to provide more efficient voting procedures with an increased level of security. However, current deployment has resulted in catastrophic failure due to unrealistic trust assumptions. In particular, the trustworthiness of hardware/software and election officials has been assumed. In practice, it is very difficult ...

The election narrative is formed under the competitions of ideas among critical players involving politicians, news media, public influentials, and the general public. Untangling the complex process of narrative formation, however, is no easy task due to implicit influences among the key players. In this paper, we propose the problem of measuring "responsiveness" that quantifies a player’s infl...

We introduce the notion of stable leader election and derive several algorithms for this problem. Roughly speaking, a leader election algorithm is stable if it ensures that once a leader is elected, it remains the leader for as long as it does not crash and its links have been behaving well, irrespective of the behavior of other processes and links. In addition to being stable, our leader elect...

The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is a system of preferential voting employed in multi-seat elections. Each vote cast by a voter is a (potentially partial) ranking over a set of candidates. No techniques currently exist for computing the margin of victory (MOV) in STV elections. The MOV is the smallest number of vote manipulations (changes, additions, and deletions) required to bring about a c...

Primary Backup Replication (PBR) is the most common technique to achieve availability in distributed systems. However, primary failure remains a crucial problem that threatens availability. When the primary fails, backup nodes in the system have to elect a new primary node in order to maintain adequate system’s operation. During election, the system suffers from transaction loss, communication ...

This paper adopts an information systems perspective to study the recent American presidential election. The election may be seen as a decision making process to choose the leader to represent the wishes and interests of the people. The system supporting the process is an information system, with information technology, inputs, outputs, users, human operators, procedures, assumptions, and goals...

The Wrong Man is President! Overvotes in the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida Using ballot-level data from the NORC Florida ballots project and ballot-image files, I argue that overvoted ballots in the 2000 presidential election in Florida included more than 50,000 votes that were intended to go to either Bush or Gore but instead were discarded. The primary reason for this was defective el...

The flurry of regulatory activity by the outgoing administration of President George W. Bush has raised, once again, the specter of midnight regulation. In contrast to the late-term action of the Clinton Administration, much of the Bush Administration‘s late-term action seems to have been more deregulatory than regulatory, but from a political and legal standpoint, that distinction may not make...

Electoral system is gaining generous endorsement across the world is biometric voter registration (BVR), which experts describe as one of the potent means of solving the election riddle called rigging. A voting system or electoral system is a method by which the voters make a choice between options, often in an election. The main aim of the project is to design a biometric electronic voting sys...