The paper presents a series of experiments in which participants were invited to vote in four one round elections and four two round elections, with the same set of five candidates, among which three were viable and two were not. The experiments were designed to test the arguments put forward by Duverger and Cox about the propensity to vote sincerely or strategically in one round and two round ...

We study the problem of coalitional manipulation in elections using the unweighted Borda rule. We provide empirical evidence of the manipulability of Borda elections in the form of two new greedy manipulation algorithms based on intuitions from the bin-packing and multiprocessor scheduling domains. Although we have not been able to show that these algorithms beat existing methods in the worst-c...

Legally binding elections require retention of specified election data such as balloting material. This applies to paper-based as well as electronic elections. However, in Germany legal requirements on retention in e-voting have not been issued so far. Based on the German legal framework for governmental as well as non-governmental paper-based elections, we give recommendations on long-term ret...

Sumanta Banerjee ([email protected]) is best known for his book In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of the Naxalite Movement in India (1980). The Maoists want a provision in the electoral rules to arm the voter with the right to reject a candidate, but if the voters are granted such a provision, will they allow them to participate in the elections, or still insist on boycotting them? It is hi...

It is well-known that the electorate in midterm elections is more ideologically extreme than the electorate in presidential elections; yet, surprisingly, we find that United States senators that are elected in midterm elections are consistently more ideologically moderate than those first elected in presidential elections. Furthermore, senators who are ousted or retire from office around presid...

The Government recently announced it was preparing for a further stage of electoral reform pilots, to be held in 2004 at the scheduled European and local authority elections. The intention is to combine these two elections, and conduct all postal voting pilots in three European regions and a further e-voting pilot in one of those chosen regions. The pilots are a significant change from those co...

We propose an alternative to current requirements for certifying voting equipment and conducting elections. We argue that elections should be structured to provide convincing affirmative evidence that the reported outcomes actually reflect how people voted. This can be accomplished with a combination of software-independent voting systems, compliance audits, and risk-limiting audits. Together, ...

In 2010 Hao, Ryan and Zielinski proposed a simple decentralized evoting protocol that only requires 2 rounds of communication. Thus, for k elections their protocol needs 2k rounds of communication. Observing that the first round of their protocol is aimed to establish the publickeys of the voters, we propose an extension of the protocol as a non-interactive e-voting scheme in the public-key set...

BACKGROUND Following initial regulatory approval of prescription drugs, many factors may influence insurers and health systems when they decide whether to add these drugs to their formularies. The role of political pressures on drug funding announcements has received relatively little attention, and elections represent an especially powerful form of political pressure. We examined the temporal ...