Do elections cause violence? Some scholars point to higher levels of unrest around elections, especially in developing countries, to assert that elections cause political violence. We develop a formal model to demonstrate that this conclusion is unfounded. In our baseline model, violence is more effective in electoral periods, leading to a spike in fighting surrounding elections. However, the p...

Recent research reveals that many NP-hard voting problems in general become polynomial-time solvable in single-peaked elections. In contrast to these results, we prove for the first time that constructive control by adding/deleting votes for Borda are NP-hard even in single-peaked elections. On the other side, we prove that constructive control by adding/deleting votes/candidates for Borda are ...

Voting with cryptographic auditing, sometimes called open-audit voting, has remained, for the most part, a theoretical endeavor. In spite of dozens of fascinating protocols and recent ground-breaking advances in the field, there exist only a handful of specialized implementations that few people have experienced directly. As a result, the benefits of cryptographically audited elections have rem...

This article explicates the mechanisms through which presidential elections shape the legislative party system, an issue that has received little attention to date. The authors argue that presidential elections exert their influence through two distinct channels. First, they affect the incentives of candidates, voters, and parties to coordinate within electoral districts. Second and most import...

Many of the small island democracies of the South Pacific are natural laboratories for constitutional and electoral experimentation, but have tended to be ignored by comparative political science research. This article examines one apparently unknown case of electoral innovation from the region: the use of Borda count voting procedures for elections in the Pacific Island states of Nauru and Kir...

Data mining technology raises concerns about the handling and use of sensitive information, especially in highly distributed environments where the participants in the system may by mutually mistrustful. In this paper we argue in favor of using some well-known cryptographic primitives, borrowed from the literature on large-scale Internet elections, in order to preserve accuracy in privacy-prese...

Two decades ago, autocratic regimes were the rule in West Africa. Today, multiparty elections are relatively routine in the region, illustrated by the large number of elections conducted in West African countries in recent years. These elections provide insights into some of the strengths and weaknesses of the electoral process. Successful transfers of power in countries such as Senegal, Guinea...

After the trials of remote internet voting for local elections in 2011 and parliamentary elections in 2013, a number of local referendums has renewed interest in internet voting in Norway. The voting scheme used in Norway is not quantum-safe and it has limited voter verifiability. In this case study, we consider how we can use fully homomorphic encryption to construct a quantum-safe voting sche...

I develop a theory of dynamic responsiveness that suggests that parties that win elections choose candidates who are more extreme and parties that lose elections choose candidates who are more moderate. Moreover, the size of past victories matters. Close elections yield little change, but landslides yield larger changes in the candidates offered by both parties. I test this theory by analyzing ...