We examine the effect of deceptive advertising on voting decisions in elections. We model twocandidate elections in which 1) voters are uncertain about candidates' attributes; and 2) candidates can inform voters of their attributes by sending advertisements. We compare political campaigns with truthful advertising to campaigns in which there is a small chance of deceptive advertising. Our theor...

Democratic societies are built around the principle of free and fair elections, and that each citizen's vote should count equally. National elections can be regarded as large-scale social experiments, where people are grouped into usually large numbers of electoral districts and vote according to their preferences. The large number of samples implies statistical consequences for the polling res...

This year (2014) in the month of May, the tenure of the 15th Lok Sabha was to end and the elections to the 543 parliamentary seats were to be held. With 813 million registered voters, out of which a 100 million were first time voters, India is the world’s largest democracy. A whooping $5 billion were spent on these elections, which made us stand second only to the US Presidential elections ($7 ...

Majority rules are frequently used to decide whether or not a public good should be provided, but will typically fail to achieve an efficient provision. We provide a worst-case analysis of the majority rule with an optimally chosen majority threshold, assuming that voters have independent private valuations and are ex-ante symmetric (provision cost shares are included in the valuations). We sho...

Little is known about how electoral institutions systematically affect the level of incumbency advantage in legislative elections. In this paper, I analyze the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) data to put the U.S. case in a comparative context and explore how electoral institutions aid or preclude incumbents from gaining an advantage. In particular, I study whether electoral system...

An important topic, in electoral studies, is the choice of the electoral system, which will be applied in parliamentary elections, because parliamentary seats distributed to political parties differ when a different system is applied. In this paper we focus on the five latest electoral systems applied in Greek Parliamentary Elections. Each one of them is described and analysed, in detail. Diffe...

Estonia has implemented internet voting as a method to participate in various types of elections since 2005. In Riigikogu (parliament) Elections of 2011, over 140,000 voters used the internet voting method. The share of votes cast over the internet among all votes was 24.3%. In light of this popularity it is questioned by various stakeholders whether internet voting can be implemented correctly...

New Zealand’s ‘district health board’ (DHB) system has been under implementation since the 1999 general election. A key factor motivating the change to DHBs is the democratisation of health care governance. A majority of the new DHB members are popularly elected. Previously, hospital board members were government appointees. Inaugural DHB elections were held in October 2001. This article report...

Remote voting systems implementing the homomorphic tallying paradigm have proven to be the best option for elections with a small range of candidates. In this paper, we propose a new homomorphic tallying remote voting system that makes use of elliptic curve cryptography. The proposed system is suitable for multiple choice elections. Detailed security and performance analysis are provided.

Sznajd model of opinion formation in socities has found many applications, primarily in politics. Here, we review the basic model, show that its natural extension to two dimensions exhibits a phase transition, and then focus on its application to proportional elections where our model predicts the exponent for the power law distribution of number of votes obtained by different candidates in Bra...