Abstract Do racial identities determine voting behaviour in post-apartheid South Africa? To address this question, we draw from a representative sample of 3,905 registered voters five metropolitan municipalities: Johannesburg, Tshwane, Durban, Cape Town, and Nelson Mandela Bay. Our findings are mixed. On the one hand, Black were significantly more likely to vote for African National Congress, w...

This paper examines the various different types of electronic voting systems, and distinguishes between electronic machine voting and electronic distance voting. The prospects of electronic voting systems are unclear; this paper observes some of the risks and the costs that are associated with electronic voting systems. This paper discusses security requirements when using information communica...

We consider the problem of manipulation of elections using positional voting rules under Impartial Culture voter behaviour. We consider both the logical possibility of coalitional manipulation, and the number of voters that must be recruited to form a manipulating coalition. It is shown that the manipulation problem may be well approximated by a very simple linear program in two variables. This...

The aim of this study is to examine the impact of Biradarism on the politics of Punjab in general and on the politics of the Khanewal District in particular. The concept of Biradarism is defined and distinguished from the concept of caste system in the Hindu culture and society. Different aspects of Biradarism which determine the voting behaviour and pattern in the subject area are carefully vi...

Empirical studies of judicial decision-making tend to focus on explaining why individual judges often come to different conclusions. The dominant understanding of decision-making on the U.S. Supreme Court is the ideologically based policy preferences of the justices, with related studies showing that American justices often make strategic choices to ensure the Court’s decisions reflect their pr...

We consider the problem of manipulation of elections using positional voting rules under Impartial Culture voter behaviour. We consider both the logical possibility of coalitional manipulation, and the number of voters that must be recruited to form a manipulating coalition. It is shown that the manipulation problem may be well approximated by a very simple linear program in two variables. This...

This paper presents an experience in formal methods integration for the speciication and validation of distributed, fault-tolerant systems. The speciication formalisms we deal with are a trace logic, based on the CSP theory, and stochastic Petri nets. Their integration allows to combine the power of event traces to specify the behaviour of a system in an intuitive and modular way and the power ...

Consensus-based Cross-correlation (ConCor) is a recently presented algorithm for robust synchronization of noisy and corrupted signals. ConCor has a number of interdependent parameters that need to be set correctly to guarantee good performance. In this paper we analyse the effects of the individual parameters on ConCor’s behaviour and performance. As a second contribution, we show that a param...

We consider a resource access control scenario in an open multi-agent system. We specify a mutable set of rules to determine how resource allocation is decided, and minimally assume agent behaviour with respect to these rules is either selfish or responsible. We then study how a combination of learning, reputation, and voting can be used, in the absence of any centralised enforcement mechanism,...