The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is a system of preferential voting employed in multi-seat elections. Each vote cast by a voter is a (potentially partial) ranking over a set of candidates. No techniques currently exist for computing the margin of victory (MOV) in STV elections. The MOV is the smallest number of vote manipulations (changes, additions, and deletions) required to bring about a c...

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)...

This paper compares voter behavior in local and national elections to make inferences about whether voters are more vigilant in monitoring the more local level of government. Vigilance is defined as retrospective voting where voters evaluate incumbents based on their overall performance during the entire term in office. We contrast voter behavior in state legislative assembly elections in India...

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, ...

Although low voter turnout in national elections has garnered considerable attention and concern, much lower turnout in municipal elections has often been largely ignored. Using a survey of cities in California, this article examines a series of institutional remedies to low turnout in mayoral and city council elections. Moving local elections to coincide with the dates of national elections wo...

It is a common fear in many countries that ideological parties will come to power through elections but will implement extreme policies. Many countries cope with this problem by overriding the election results when such parties are elected. We demonstrate that the alternative approach of containing these parties within the democratic system is more effective. We show that, as the probability of...

The aim of this presentation is to highlight the common problems disabled voters have during elections and to emphasize the importance of mobile voting in creating a more inclusive, participatory democracy. Results of a qualitative textual analysis of a web-based forum about the experiences of disabled citizens during the 2009 local government elections are used to identify the legal, physical,...

Our paper contributes to the interdisciplinary foundations for legally binding online elections in Germany. We focus on long-term retention of election documents as this is an issue of vital importance in terms of verifying the legitimacy of an election. With regard to conventional paper-based elections, specific documents have to be retained (for example the ballots or the voters’ register) fo...

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...