Germany went to the polls on Sunday, May 25 to elect 96 members of the European Parliament, by far the country in Europe that elects most delegates. The 96 members were elected by a pure proportional electoral system, a real novelty for nationwide elections in Germany, where the minimum threshold has always been 5% for the national elections and 3% for the European elections. This change was th...

This note provides an introduction to the PPATS Commitment Consistent Encryption (CCE) scheme proposed by Cuvelier, Pereira and Peters [7] and its use in the design of end-to-end verifiable elections with a perfectly private audit trail. These elections can be verified using audit data that will never leak any information about the vote, even if all the private keys of the elections are comprom...

An influential paper by Caughey and Sekhon (2011a) suggests that the outcomes of very close US House elections in the postwar eramay not be as-if random, thus calling into question this application of regression discontinuity for causal inference. We show that while incumbent party candidates are more likely to win close House elections, those who win are no di erent on observable characteristi...

In 2004, the Government of Timor-Leste introduced elections to villages (suku). Timor-Leste had only been formally independent since 20021, after some centuries of colonisation by Portugal (variable in the timing and degree of penetration), almost twenty-five years of more systematic occupation by Indonesia (1975–99), and two years of centralised transitional administration by the United Nation...

There is a large literature on economic voting in the United States, which shows that the economy matters in presidential and congressional elections. Puzzlingly, however, the state politics literature has failed to find clear evidence for economic voting in gubernatorial elections. In this study, I use population-based datasets of state and county-level economic conditions from 1969-2016 to ex...

Auctions and elections are seemingly disjoint research fields. Nevertheless, we observe that similar cryptographic primitives are used in both fields. For instance, mixnets, homomorphic encryption, and trapdoor bitcommitments, have been used by state-of-the-art schemes in both fields. These developments have appeared independently. For example, the adoption of mixnets in elections preceded a si...

This article takes a closer look at how presidential elections affect the fragmentation of the legislative party system. It reviews the theory and conventional empirical modelling strategy; identifies some drawbacks to this strategy and suggests solutions; and then conducts an empirical investigation of the implications of this critique by combining replication data from Golder (2006) with new ...

1. THE PROBLEM. Something is rotten in the electoral state of the United States. Mathematics is involved. Advances in computer technology—hardware and software— have permitted a great leap “forward” in the fine art of political gerrymandering—“the practice of dividing a geographical area into electoral districts, often of highly irregular shape, to give one political party an unfair advantage b...