Incumbents significantly outperform challengers in American elections, but the normative implications of this phenomenon are ambiguous. Do incompetent officials exploit the political system to keep themselves in power, or do open elections effectively select for good leaders? To address this question, I define and estimate three components of incumbent success in elections— (1) party match, (2)...

We propose an alternative to current requirements for certifying voting equipment and conducting elections. We argue that elections should be structured to provide convincing affirmative evidence that the reported outcomes actually reflect how people voted. This can be accomplished with a combination of software-independent voting systems, compliance audits, and risk-limiting audits. Together, ...

WHEN IT ADOPTED its current state constitution in 1970, Illinois transferred responsibility over its elections from the secretary of state to a newly created state board of elections.1 The secretary of state at the time, Paul Powell, was a colorful figure in state politics with a less than sterling reputation.2 Illinois of course has a storied history of political corruption, which at least in ...

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...

Recent academic assessments of the potential for secure Internet-based voting have been extremely pessimistic. A panel assembled to review the Department of Defense’s SERVE (Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment) project– a system designed to allow foreign-based members of the armed services to vote online in Federal elections, which was nearly deployed for the 2004 election–conc...

A possible explanation for the rise of the incumbency advantage in U.S. elections asserts that party and incumbency are close informational substitutes. With the declining psychological importance of party, voters attached themselves to the next available piece of information { incumbency. A critical test of this idea arises in the peculiar circumstances of Minnesota state legislative elections...

Decades of research on voting in American elections have consistently identified political parties as a predominant determinant of vote choice. Parties play a valuable role in helping voters overcome a lack of substantive information by providing them with low-information cues and shortcuts. However, in many elections, party cues are either absent (as in ballot measure elections and non-partisa...

In 2010 Hao, Ryan and Zielinski proposed a simple decentralized e-voting protocol that only requires 2 rounds of communication. Thus, for k elections their protocol needs 2k rounds of communication. Observing that the first round of their protocol is aimed to establish the public-keys of the voters, we propose an extension of the protocol as a non-interactive e-voting scheme in the public-key s...

In this paper, I argue that the timing of city council elections plays a important role in shaping municipal land use policy. When elections are held off-cycle (i.e. on a date separate from high-profile national elections) interest groups that oppose new growth are more likely to turn out and vote. This stems from an asymmetry over the costs and benefits of growth: new housing development yield...

Using the mathematical model for hit phenomena, we analyze the political elections in Japan. The mathematical model of hit phenomena is a theory of time-dependent humanhuman interaction based on the many-body theory in physics. In contrast to the simple measurement of the total number of posting to weblogs and twitter for each candidate of elections, we found that the direct communication stren...