Would holding elections by mail increase voter turnout? Many electoral reform advocates predict that mail ballot elections will boost participation, basing their prediction on the high turnout rate among absentee voters and on the rise in voter turnout after Oregon switched to voting by mail. However, selection problems inherent to studies of absentee voters and Oregon give us important reasons...

We investigate the effect of ballot order on the outcomes of California city council and school board elections. Candidates listed first win office between four and five percentage points more often than expected absent order effects. This first candidate advantage is larger in races with more candidates and for higher quality candidates. The first candidate advantage is similar across contexts...

Strategic Voting In British Elections In this paper we examine the extent to which voters engage in strategic behavior. Our contribution is accounting for the context in which voters have the opportunity to behave in a strategic fashion. We also demonstrate that previous measures of strategic voting significantly underestimated the willingness of voters to engage in strategic behavior when pres...

In a multi-level election, voters are divided into groups, an election is held within each group, and some deterministic procedure is used to combine the group results to determine the overall election result. Examples of multi-level elections include U.S. presidential elections and some parliamentary elections (such as those with regional groupings of voters). The results of such an election c...

This thesis examines the relationship between contested judicial elections and the value of total damages in product liability trials. For years, legal scholars have argued that judicial elections pose a direct threat to a judge's impartiality, but this thesis is one of only a few studies to observe judicial elections' quantitative effects on the application of law. Narrowing the focus of this ...

A number of voter-verifiable electronic voting schemes have been introduced in the recent decades. These schemes not only provide each voter with a receipt without the threat of coercion and ballot selling, but also the ballot tallying phase can be publicly verified. Furthermore, these schemes are robust because the power of authorities can be threshold distributed. Generally speaking, the homo...

We investigate elections that are simultaneously singlepeaked and single-crossing (SPSC). We show that the domain of 1-dimensional Euclidean elections (where voters and candidates are points on the real line, and each voter prefers the candidates that are close to her to the ones that are further away) is a proper subdomain of the SPSC domain, by constructing an election that is single-peaked a...

Recently, remote voting systems have gained popularity and have been used for government elections and referendums in the United Kingdom, Estonia and Switzerland as well as municipal elections in Canada and party primary elections in the United States and France. Current remote voting schemes assume either the voter’s personal computer is trusted or the voter is not physically coerced. In this ...

In the last fifty years, perhaps no facet of American constitutional democracy has changed more than campaigns for judicial office. Judicial elections long stood in sharp contrast to elections for executive, legislative, or administrative office. In keeping with the judicial role of impartial adjudicator, judicial candidates historically avoided political controversy and campaigned on “polite p...

This paper studies how to provide support for ballot-level post-election audits. Informed by our work supporting pilots of these audits in several California counties, we identify gaps in current technology in tools for this task: we need better ways to count voted ballots (from scanned images) without access to scans of blank, unmarked ballots; and we need improvements to existing techniques t...