Elections with small margins of victory represent an important form of electoral competition and, increasingly, an opportunity for causal inference. Scholars using regression discontinuity designs (RDD) have interpreted the winners of close elections as randomly separated from the losers, using marginal election results as an experimental assignment of office-holding to one candidate versus the...

Similar to Circadian, the moon, and sunspots, U.S. elections occur on a regular cycle. For those in the U.S. this is a natural part of a democracy. However, in other nations, national elections are not necessarily regularly scheduled. In Britain, for example, the prime minister requests the Queen to call elections at a time the P.M. believes is most political advantageous. It cannot be longer t...

The relationship between judicial elections and judicial independence is receiving considerable scrutiny today. This article examines the impact of elections on judicial independence from the perspective of voters, since it is voters’ choices that ultimately determine the electoral fates of incumbent judges. The research on voting in judicial elections helps in understanding the circumstances t...

We address various voting systems and types of control of elections and show how hard control problems can be modeled as integer programs. By means of the off-the-shelf solver Cplex we then demonstrate that the approach allows to treat the control of larger elections successfully. As a consequence, the hardness of a certain control problem is not a secure protection for the fraudulent falsifica...

Would holding elections by mail increase voter turnout? Many electoral reform advocates predict that mail ballot elections will boost participation, basing their prediction on the high turnout rate among absentee voters and on the rise in voter turnout after Oregon switched to voting by mail. However, selection problems inherent to studies of absentee voters and Oregon give us important reasons...

We investigate the effect of ballot order on the outcomes of California city council and school board elections. Candidates listed first win office between four and five percentage points more often than expected absent order effects. This first candidate advantage is larger in races with more candidates and for higher quality candidates. The first candidate advantage is similar across contexts...

Strategic Voting In British Elections In this paper we examine the extent to which voters engage in strategic behavior. Our contribution is accounting for the context in which voters have the opportunity to behave in a strategic fashion. We also demonstrate that previous measures of strategic voting significantly underestimated the willingness of voters to engage in strategic behavior when pres...

In a multi-level election, voters are divided into groups, an election is held within each group, and some deterministic procedure is used to combine the group results to determine the overall election result. Examples of multi-level elections include U.S. presidential elections and some parliamentary elections (such as those with regional groupings of voters). The results of such an election c...

This thesis examines the relationship between contested judicial elections and the value of total damages in product liability trials. For years, legal scholars have argued that judicial elections pose a direct threat to a judge's impartiality, but this thesis is one of only a few studies to observe judicial elections' quantitative effects on the application of law. Narrowing the focus of this ...

A number of voter-verifiable electronic voting schemes have been introduced in the recent decades. These schemes not only provide each voter with a receipt without the threat of coercion and ballot selling, but also the ballot tallying phase can be publicly verified. Furthermore, these schemes are robust because the power of authorities can be threshold distributed. Generally speaking, the homo...