We consider a voter model in which there are two candidates and initially, in the population Z, four connected blocks of same opinions. We assume that a citizen changes his mind at a rate proportional to the number of its neighbors that disagree with him, and we study the passage from four to two connected blocks of same opinions. More precisely we make explicit the generating function of the p...

Printing Prêt à Voter ballots on demand is desirable both for convenience and security. It allows a polling station to serve numerous different ballots, and it avoids many problems associated with the custody of the printouts. This paper describes a new proposal for printing Prêt à Voter ballots on demand. The emphasis is on computational efficiency suitable for real elections, and on very gene...

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) render a valuable platform for tackling one of democracy’s central challenges: low voter turnout. Studies indicate that lack of information and cost-benefit considerations cause voters to abstain from voting. VAAs are online voting assistance tools which match own political preferences with those of candidates and parties in elections. By assisting voters in th...

Fowler, Baker, and Dawes (2008) recently showed in two independent studies of twins that voter turnout has very high heritability. Here we investigate two specific genes that may contribute to variation in voting behavior. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we show that individuals with a polymorphism of the MAOA gene are significantly more likely to have vote...

Regular church attendance is strongly associated with a higher probability of voting. It is an open question as to whether this association, which has been confirmed in numerous surveys, is causal. We use the repeal of the laws restricting Sunday retail activity (“blue laws”) to measure the effects of church-going on political participation. The repeal of blue laws caused a 5 percent decrease i...