We study leader election in unidirectional rings of homonym processes that have no a priori knowledge on the number of processes. We show that message-terminating leader election is impossible for any class of rings Kk with bounded multiplicity k ≥ 2. However, we show that process-terminating leader election is possible in the subclass U∗ ∩ Kk, where U ∗ is the class of rings which contain a pr...

A distributed system is self-stabilizing if it can be started in any possible global state. Once started the system regains its consistency by itself, without any kind of outside intervention. The self-stabilization property makes the system tolerant to faults in which processors exhibit a faulty behavior for a while and then recover spontaneously in an arbitrary state. When the intermediate pe...

Derived from the analysis of several election processes carried out within the last two decades, we have to ask ourselves whether there actually exists a democracy in Mexico, and if so, if it’s society is really being listened to by its government. The reality is that the number of null-votes in election processes has increased over the years, without it having any impact whatsoever in the coun...

The United States' experience with the Ebola virus in 2014 provides a window into US public health politics. First, the United States provided a case study in the role of suasion and executive action in the management of public health in a fragmented multi-level system. The variable capacity of different parts of the United States to respond to Ebola on the level of hospitals or state governmen...

There are many ways to aggregate individual preferences to a collective preference or outcome. The outcome is strongly dependent on the aggregation procedure (election mechanism), rather than on the individual preferences. The Dutch election procedure is based on proportional representation, one nation-wide district, categoric voting and the Plurality ranking rule, while the British procedure i...

Forecasting seat outcomes in legislative elections in countries with stable, two-party systems is su ciently challenging as to have proven elusive for much of democratic experience. Forecasting an election in a relatively new democracy with a uid multi-party system, therefore, would seem on its face to be a hopeless objective. In this paper I attempt to demonstrate that election forecasting in ...

With Supreme Court and election uncertainty now resolved over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), employers are recognizing the need for immediate action and reassessing the role they play in promoting and insuring the health of their population. Centered on a consistent need to have a workforce that is healthy, present and high-performing, employers face four possible strateg...

A risk-limiting audit is a statistical method to create confidence in the correctness of an election result by checking samples of paper ballots. In order to perform an audit, one usually needs to know what the election margin is, i.e., the number of votes that would need to be changed in order to change the election outcome. In this paper, we present a fully automatic method for computing elec...

Self-stabilizing algorithms are designed to guarantee convergence to some desired stable state from arbitrary initial states arising out of an arbitrarily large number of faults. However, in a well-designed system, the simultaneous occurrence of a large number of faults is rare. It is therefore desirable to design algorithms that are not only self-stabilizing, but also have the ability to recov...

The aim of this paper is to identify user errors, and the related potential design deficiencies, that contributed to participants failing to vote cast and vote verify across three end-to-end voting systems: Helios, Prêt à Voter, and Scantegrity II. To understand why voters could not cast a vote 42% of the time and verify that their ballots were cast and counted with the tested e2e systems 53% o...