Election forecasts have traditionally been based on representative polls, in which randomly sampled individuals are asked for whom they intend to vote. While representative polling has historically proven to be quite effective, it comes at considerable financial and time costs. Moreover, as response rates have declined over the past several decades, the statistical benefits of representative sa...

We provide an analysis of voter and poll worker perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of a new e-voting system vis–à–vis traditional ballot-and-envelope voting in the 2011 election in Salta, Argentina. The results of this comparison provide new insights into how poll workers perceive the implementation of new voting technologies and show that both points of view need to be taken into ...

In this paper, we assert that usability and security for poll workers are intimately linked in enabling free, fair, and secure elections. By focusing on these important but often neglected users of voting systems in designing voting systems, unintended security problems can be avoided. The overall goal of our research was to create a framework for voting system manufacturers to meet the require...

In Doodle polls, each voter may approve a subset of the available alternatives according to his preferences. While such polls can be captured by the standard models of Approval voting, Zou et al. [17] analyse reallife Doodle poll data and conclude that poll participants’ behaviour seems to be affected by considerations other than their intrinsic preferences over the alternatives. In particular,...

Physical treatment is only one aspect of the therapeutic process in a psychiatric hospital. Personal relationships between patients and members of the staff and between patient and patient in the wards are also important but little is known about the extent to which they favour recovery. In this article Dr. F. T. Thorpe describes a Patients' Opinion Poll held at Middlewood Hospital, Sheffield t...

We exploit a voting reform in France to estimate the causal effect of exit poll information on turnout and bandwagon voting. Before the change in legislation, individuals in some French overseas territories voted after the election result had already been made public via exit poll information from mainland France. We estimate that knowing the exit poll information decreases voter turnout by abo...

We investigate the incentives faced by poll respondents when candidates use polling data to inform their selection of policy platforms. Focusing on models with a unidimensional policy space, single peaked preferences and two office-seeking candidates observing a summary statistic from polls that ask respondents their preferences, we find that for most environments honest poll response cannot oc...

This study examines the role of perceptions of opinion polls in assessing media performance in the 2010 midterm elections using data collected in a southern state. Results show strong hostile media effect in viewing the favorability of the polls and the third-person effect in assessing the impact of the polls on others and oneself. Moreover, results indicate that the influence of hostile polls ...

We develop a formal model of opinion polls in elections and study how they influence the voting behaviour of the participating agents, and thereby election outcomes. This approach is particularly relevant to the study of collective decision making by means of voting in multiagent systems, where it is reasonable to assume that we can precisely model the amount of information available to agents ...