The role of civil society in elections often takes the form of support for the institutional processes of a democratic election as well as the more substantive development of a democratic electorate. Civil society does, however, have a role to play in reducing election-related conflict dynamics and promoting a peaceful electoral environment. This paper examines the role of the KwaZulu-Natal Dem...

Pattern recognition study demonstrates that the outcomes of American midterm senatorial elections follow the dynamics of simple integral parameters that depict preelectoral situations aggregated to the state as a whole. A set of "commonsense" parameters is identified that is sufficient to predict such elections state-by-state and year-by-year. The analysis rejects many similar commonsense param...

5. Auditor or Certification Authority certifies that the election results are correct and have been determined as originally specified. Who the Auditor is depends on who the results are being certified for. In physical elections in the US this role is played by a specified government/judicial official. In physical elections in some countries like India, this role is played by a citizen who is n...

Studies of political budget cycles in developing countries have generally sought to inform understanding of short-term fiscal dynamics, but can also offer unique insight into broader political dynamics in developing countries. This article correspondingly employs markedly improved data in order to study the impact of elections on tax collection, and draw broader lessons. It shows that while ele...

This study explores the extent to which campaign visibility facilitates electoral participation, using data from firstand second-order elections in Britain. Our contribution to the existing literature is threefold. First, we assess whether the effects of campaign effort are conditioned by marginality, finding that campaign mobilisation gets out the vote regardless of the competitiveness of the ...

We propose a new encryption primitive, commitment consistent encryption (CCE), and instances of this primitive that enable building the first universally verifiable voting schemes with a perfectly private audit trail (PPAT) and practical complexity. That is: – the audit trail that is published for verifying elections guarantees everlasting privacy, and – the computational load required from the...

During the 2013 elections in Israel one of the major methods of interaction of the political parties and their leaders with potential voters was through their Facebook pages. These pages were followed for 50 days preceding the elections. For each page, 30% of the posts on the page were analyzed in terms of their rhetoric and subject. The largest number of the analyzed posts was intended for bon...

How often will elections end in landslides? What is the probability for a head-to-head race? Analyzing ballot results from several large countries rather anomalous and yet unexplained distributions have been observed. We identify tactical voting as the driving ingredient for the anomalies and introduce a model to study its effect on plurality elections, characterized by the relative strength of...

Electronic voting may be a feasible option for several election environments, from closed-group elections to nation-wide elections. Especially with online voting, people will be able to cast their votes through a web browser, from their home or any other location where they can get Internet access. This paper reviews the generic cryptographic models that have been proposed in the academic liter...

Efficient post-election audits select the number of machines or precincts to audit based in part on the margin of victory (the number of ballots that must be changed in order to change the outcome); a close election needs more auditing than a landslide victory. For a simple “first-pastthe-post” election, the margin is easily computed based on the number of votes the first and second place candi...