Sorting of Candidates: Evidence from 20,000 Electoral Ballots

Public Evidence from Secret Ballots

Elections seem simple—aren’t they just about counting? But they have a unique, challenging combination of security and privacy requirements. The stakes are high; the context is adversarial; the electorate needs to be convinced that the results are correct; and the secrecy of the ballot must be ensured. They also have practical constraints: time is of the essence, and voting systems need to be a...

Translating into Votes: The Electoral Impacts of Spanish-Language Ballots

Electoral competition with policy-motivated candidates

In the multi-dimensional spatial model of elections with two policymotivated candidates, we prove that the candidates must adopt the same policy platform in equilibrium. Moreover, when the number of voters is odd, if the gradients of the candidates’ utility functions point in different directions, then they must locate at some voter’s ideal point and a strong symmetry condition must be satisfie...

Multidimensional electoral competition between differentiated candidates

It is known that multidimensional Downsian competition fails to admit an equilibrium in pure strategies unless very stringent conditions on the distribution of voters’bliss points are imposed (Plott 1967). This paper revisits this problem considering that the two vote share maximizing candidates are differentiated. That is, candidates strategically decide positions only in some of the n dimensi...

Electoral Competition with Privately Informed Candidates∗ (Preliminary)

We consider a model of elections in which two office-motivated candidates are uncertain about the location of the median voter’s ideal point, and in which candidates receive private signals about the location of the median prior to taking policy positions. Assuming signal spaces are finite, we show that there is at most one pure strategy equilibrium and give a sharp characterization, if one exi...