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...

Previous comparative research into the determinants of voting using aggregate data has suffered from two limitations: it relied predominantly on country-level data; and it seldom ventured beyond a consideration of one or two types of elections. In order to overcome these shortcomings, we use an original dataset in which data are aggregated to sub-national units; and include examples of national...

1.1 Case Selection Criteria and Presidentialism We elaborate on each of our case selection criteria in turn. First, the explanation for our chosen time period is straightforward. We saw no reason to not broaden our coverage both forwards and backwards in time relative to the literature, provided the appropriate data were available. This ensured that our presidential regime-only models would hav...

The goal of this dissertation is to aid our understanding of how electoral institutions in the United States affect political participation and, in turn, shape policy outcomes. I investigate this relationship by analyzing the all-mail balloting method known as Vote By Mail. Using a data set of 3310 cases representing elections in 7 states, I show that the use of Vote By Mail produces an overall...

Iran’s June 2009 elections set into motion four processes that are central to the operations of the Islamic Republic regime. They include: the growing gap between large sections of Iranian society from the Islamic Republican state; the steady militarization of the political system; the unprecedented degree to which the Supreme Leader has become an active partisan in the increasingly bitter poli...

The Estonian parliamentary election in 2007 is regarded as a success story of large-scale Internet elections. I use this election in a single case study on practical security to show that low quality of security and its management does not necessarily prevent large-scale Internet elections from being conducted. I also provide research propositions with regard to future challenges for large-scal...

Research examining the predictive power of social media (especially Twitter) displays conflicting results, particularly in the domain of political elections. This paper applies methods used in studies that have shown a direct correlation between volume/sentiment of Twitter chatter and future electoral results in a new dataset about political elections. We show that these methods display a serie...