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We introduce a general problem about bribery in voting systems. In the $\mathcal{R}$-Multi-Bribery problem, the goal is to bribe a set of voters at minimum cost such that a desired candidate wins the perturbed election under the voting rule R. Voters assign prices for withdrawing their vote, for swapping the positions of two consecutive candidates in their preference order, and for perturbing their approval count to favour candidates. As our main result, we show that $\mathcal{R}$-Multi-Bribery is fixed-parameter tractable parameterized by the number of candidates for many natural voting rules $\mathcal{R}$, including Kemeny rule, all scoring protocols, maximin rule, Bucklin rule, fallback rule, SP-AV, and any C1 rule. In particular, our result resolves the parameterized complexity of $\mathcal{R}$-Swap Bribery for all those voting rules, thereby solving a long-standing open problem and "Challenge #2" of the "Nine Research Challenges in Computational Social Choice" by Bredereck et al. Further, our algorithm runs in single-exponential time for arbitrary cost; it thus improves the earlier double-exponential time algorithm by Dorn and Schlotter that is restricted to the uniform-cost case for all scoring protocols, the maximin rule, and Bucklin rule., Comment: extended abstract appeared in proceedings of STACS 2017

International audience; In federal unions, how many weights should be given to each state in a two-tier voting system, given that the majority rule is used at each level? We apply a majority criterion to evaluate these voting rules: An apportionment of the seats among the states is majority efficient if it minimizes the probability of electing the candidate who receives less than 50% of the votes in a two candidate competition over the whole union. Depending on the assumptions that we use to describe the electoral process, either the proportional or the square root rule can emerge as an optimal solution.

The organization of US presidential elections make them potentially vulnerable to so-called “voting paradoxes”, identified by social choice theorists but rarely documented empirically. The presence of a record high number of candidates in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries may have made this possibility particularly latent. Using polling data from the primaries we identify two possible cases: Early in the pre-primary (2015) a cyclical majority may have existed in Republican voters’ preferences between Bush, Cruz and Walker—thereby giving a rare example of the Condorcet Paradox. Furthermore, later polling data (March 2016) suggests that while Trump (who achieved less than 50% of the total Republican primary vote) was the Plurality Winner, he could have been beaten in pairwise contests by at least one other candidate—thereby exhibiting a case of the Borda Paradox. The cases confirm the empirical relevance of the theoretical voting paradoxes and the importance of voting procedures.

In an economic theory of voting, voters have positive or negative costs of voting in favor of a proposal and positive or negative benefits from an accepted proposal. When votes have equal weight then simultaneous voting mostly has a unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium which is independent of benefits. Voting with respect to (arbitrarily small) costs alone, however, often results in voting against the “true majority” (Groseclose and Milyo, 2010). If voting is sequential as in the roll call votes of the US Senate then, in the unique subgame perfect equilibrium, the ”true majority” prevails (Groseclose and Milyo, 2013). It is shown that the result for sequential voting holds also with different weights of voters (shareholders), with multiple necessary majorities (EU decision making), or even more general rules. Simultaneous voting in the general model has more differentiated results.

We study the equilibria of the standard pivotal-voter participation game between two groups of voters of asymmetric sizes (majority and minority), as originally proposed by Palfrey and Rosenthal (Public Choice 41(1):7–53, 1983). We find a unique equilibrium wherein the minority votes with certainty and the majority votes with probability in (0, 1); we prove that this is the only equilibrium in which voters of only one group play a pure strategy, and we provide sufficient conditions for its existence. Equilibria where voters of both groups vote with probability in (0, 1) are analyzed numerically.

A basic problem in voting theory is that all the strategy profiles in which nobody is pivotal are Nash equilibria. We study elections where voters decide simultaneously on several binary issues. We extend the concept of conditional sincerity introduced by Alesina and Rosenthal (Econometrica 64(6):1311–1341, 1996) and propose an intuitive and simple criterion to refine equilibria in which players are not pivotal. This is shown to have a foundation in a refinement of perfection that takes into account the material voting procedure. We prove that in large elections the proposed solution is characterized through a weaker definition of Condorcet winner and always survives sophisticated voting.

Voter-verifiable voting systems place significant demands of both effort and knowledge onto ordinary voters who have only limited incentives to participate. We suggest the use of third-party verifiable voting systems, harnessing the very strong incentives for candidates and observers to verify that votes are correctly counted. A generic modification enabling this via the use of pre-filled ballots and secure depositing is outlined and we demonstrate this modification by applying it to two major voter-verifiable voting systems. Additionally, potential vulnerabilities of this approach are discussed.

We conduct an experiment to characterize the “expressive” voting behavior of political partisans. We find that participants who are asked to vote on the answer to factual questions tend to offer more partisan responses than those who must answer as decisive individuals. We further test whether voters exploit corrective information that sometimes challenges their partisan views. When information is available, we observe smaller partisan gaps and more correct responses, especially when the information is free. When information is costly to acquire, we find that voters generally choose to remain uninformed, consistent with the Downsian theory of rational ignorance.

In French parliamentary and local elections, candidates ranked first and second in the first round automatically qualify for the second round, while a third candidate qualifies only when selected by more than 12.5 percent of registered citizens. Using a fuzzy RDD around this threshold, we find that the third candidate's presence substantially increases the share of registered citizens who vote for any candidate and reduces the vote share of the top two candidates. It disproportionately harms the candidate ideologically closest to the third and causes her defeat in one fifth of the races. Additional evidence suggests that these results are driven by voters who value voting expressively over voting strategically for the top‐two candidate they dislike the least to ensure her victory; and by third candidates who, absent party‐level agreements leading to their dropping out, value the benefits associated with competing in the second round more than influencing its outcome.

Do citizens hold congressional candidates accountable for their policy positions? Recent studies reach different conclusions on this important question. In line with the predictions of spatial voting theory, a number of recent survey-based studies have found reassuring evidence that voters choose the candidate with the most spatially proximate policy positions. In contrast, most electoral studies find that candidates’ ideological moderation has only a small association with vote margins, especially in the modern, polarized Congress. We bring clarity to these discordant findings using the largest dataset to date of voting behavior in congressional elections. We find that the ideological positions of congressional candidates have only a small association with citizens’ voting behavior. Instead, citizens cast their votes “as if” based on proximity to parties rather than individual candidates. The modest degree of candidate-centered spatial voting in recent Congressional elections may help explain the polarization and lack of responsiveness in the contemporary Congress.

We analyze a costly voting model with multiple candidates under plurality rule. In equilibrium, the set of candidates is partitioned into a set of “relevant candidates” (which contains at least two candidates) and the remaining candidates. All relevant candidates receive votes and have an equal chance of winning, independent of their popular support levels. The remaining candidates do not receive any votes. Furthermore, all voters who cast votes do so for their most preferred candidate, i.e., there is no “strategic voting.”

The competing theories of proximity and directional voting have long been used to model voting behavior. Empirically evaluating these theories, however, requires knowledge of voters’ utilities, which are inherently unobserved. Empiricists have generally dealt with this by using self-reports of utility. Yet, self-reports are likely biased, leaving experimental predictions at odds with real-world election outcomes. We improve upon this method by constructing a discrete choice model which is able to measure the likelihood of any one voter exhibiting proximity voting behavior as opposed to directional voting behavior, without needing to know voters’ utilities. We subsequently conduct a voting experiment with over 1,800 participants to estimate the parameters of the model. Our results suggest that, among voters whose expected behavior differs across the two theories, there is an approximately even split between voting behaviors, and the probability of exhibiting proximity voting behavior decreases by roughly 10 percentage points for each step away from the midpoint of a (−10 to +10) political spectrum. Our results are robust across two measures of preferences and four candidate pairings. The outcomes of our experiment are also consistent with the results of the 2012 Presidential Election, which took place the day after our experiment closed.

Distance rationalization of voting rules is based on the minimization of the distance to some plausible criterion, such as unanimity or the Condorcet criterion. We propose a new alternative: the optimization of the distance to undesirable voting rules, namely, the dictatorial voting rules. Applying a plausible metric between social choice functions, we obtain two results: (i) the plurality rule minimizes the sum of the distances to the dictatorial rules and can be regarded in some sense as a compromise lying between all dictatorial rules; (ii) the reverse-plurality rule maximizes the distance to the closest dictator.

To date, most of our knowledge regarding individuals' propensity to internet vote comes from cross-sectional survey data. In this paper we try to break new ground by tracking individuals' actual behaviour over time. Specifically, we analyze citizens' choice of voting channel by exploiting a unique longitudinal dataset – the Canton of Geneva's vote registry database. Our aim is to explore patterns in the propensity to use internet voting among eligible voters. To this end, we first mine the registry data to identify a subset of voters that have experimented with internet voting. In a second stage, we explore the effects of key socio–demographic variables on individual voters' fidelity to internet voting. Our results are counter–intuitive. While the conventional wisdom is that younger voters are most likely to be mobilised to use the internet voting channel, we show that this is not the case in one of the few political systems where internet voting is readily available. Indeed, our evidence suggests that it is the older voters rather than ‘digital natives' (i.e., the younger voters) that are most likely to remain faithful to internet voting once they have experimented with it.

We build a model of voluntary and costly expressive voting, where the relative weight of ideology and valence issues over voting costs determines how people vote and if they actually turn out to vote. In line with the conventional rational calculus approach, the model predicts that the cost of voting depresses voter turnout. Against the conventional wisdom, though, high voting cost/low turnout elections tend to have a larger share of voters for whom the common value signal on candidates’ valence matches their private value views, thus raising the chances that high valence candidates are elected.

Voting rule performances are sometimes evaluated according to their respective resistances to allow profitable misrepresentation of individual preferences. This seems to be a hard task when scoring systems with possibly non integer weights are involved. In this paper, it is shown how one can still obtain asymptotic results in these settings. Our analysis for three-candidate elections provides a characterization of unstable voting situations at which a positional voting rule is manipulable by some coalition not larger than an arbitrary proportion of the electorate. This allows us to address a conjecture by Pritchard and Wilson (2007). That is, under the Impartial Anonymous Culture (IAC), the plurality rule asymptotically minimizes the vulnerability to coalitional manipulation when the size of the manipulating coalition is unrestricted. This later result is no longer valid when only manipulation by small coalitions is considered: now, the Borda rule tends to outperform other rules. Furthermore, the vulnerability of a positional voting rule to coalitional manipulation is not affected by increasing the size of the manipulating coalition from 0.5 to 1.

The paper studies the risk that all members of a set of voters give their votes unanimously and thereby breach the privacy of the voting procedure. This problem becomes relevant in the situation that the voting behavior of a small (sub)set of voters can be identified by the way they transmit their votes, e. g., when at least two possible ways to give votes (like voting with ballot boxes, postal voting, and electronic voting) are admitted in theory but one of them is used by only a small minority of voters in practice. For the situation of a simple alternative between “yes” and “no” it turns out that as long as the probability of approval lies between 25% and 75% the probability of a breach of vote privacy by unanimous voting is smaller than 1% if there are at least 17 voters and even smaller than 0.1% if there are at least 25 voters. If, however, the rate of approval or disapproval increases, even to values already observed in reality, then the probability of such a breach of vote privacy can no longer be neglected. And even small values for the probability of a breach of vote privacy sum up when several thousands of these situations appear in parallel. Furthermore, if there is a three valued situation “yes” – “no” – “abstention” present, then, depending on the concept of vote privacy, a breach of it becomes considerably more probable even if the probability of approval remains within the boundaries mentioned above.

Under mixed systems, voters cast two votes to elect the same legislative body: one vote for parties using proportional rules and one for candidates using majoritarian rules. Voters are said to cast straight-tickets if the candidate they vote for is of the same party as their proportional vote; otherwise, they are said to cast split-tickets. Split-ticket voting is commonly used as a measure of strategic voting as splitters are usually assumed to express their true preference in one vote but vote strategically in the other. This study challenges this practice showing that split-ticket voting does not necessarily indicate strategic voting, just as straight-ticket voting does not necessarily indicate a sincere vote. This result has wider consequences as it indicates that measuring strategic voting from observed behaviour can result in incorrect conclusions about vote choice.

Under ideal conditions, when do voters switch from sincere to strategic voters? Despite a large literature on strategic voting and Duverger’s Law, few studies assess when individuals shift from sin...

This article related to the use of signs and symbols as a protest vote beyond the invalid votes of the presidential election 2014 in Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta (DIY). This paper will interpret the hidden messages conveyed by voters through a ballot. This article contributes to solve two problems at once, the conceptual and practical. Conceptually, there is a gap in the study of protest voting. Protest voting describes that voting as not only used to support candidates or parties but can be used as a form of protest. However, in this paper the protest was not conveyed through voting but using signs, symbols, or messages in ballot. Practically, there are problems in the electoral system on viewing people votes. The current electoral system generalizes the approach on viewing invalid votes. Whereas, there some hidden messages of people votes and the essence of the election itself beyond the invalid ballot papers. This paper shows that these messages can not be accommodated by the current electoral system. Those include an indication of post-election money politics, expressions of blissful voters delivered on the ballot, the expletives and insults expressed by voters, a rejection of the candidates, and also a rejection for the current electoral system.

Understanding when and how computational complexity can be used to protect elections against different manipulative actions has been a highly active research area over the past two decades. Much of this literature, however, makes the assumption that the voters or agents specify a complete preference ordering over the set of candidates. There are many multiagent systems applications, and even real-world elections, where this assumption is not warranted, and this in turn raises a series of questions on the impact of partial voting on the complexity of manipulative actions. In this paper, we focus on two of these questions. First, we address the question of how hard it is to manipulate elections when the agents specify only top-truncated ballots. Here, in particular, we look at the weighted manipulation problem—both constructive and destructive manipulation—when the voters are allowed to specify top-truncated ballots, and we provide general results for all scoring rules, for elimination versions of all scoring rules, for the plurality with runoff rule, for a family of election systems known as Copeland $$^{\alpha }$$ , and for the maximin protocol. The second question we address is the impact of top-truncated voting on the complexity of manipulative actions in electorates with structured preference profiles. In particular, we consider electorates that are single-peaked and we show how, for many voting protocols, allowing top-truncated voting reimposes the $$\mathcal {NP}$$ -hardness shields that normally vanish in such electorates.

Rates of invalid voting in Latin America are among the highest in the world. Yet, scholars have not reached an agreement about whether these votes are driven by voter protest and, if so, what voters are protesting. Understanding whether these high invalid vote rates signify anti-democratic tendencies is particularly relevant given recent recessions in democratic quality across the region. This paper presents a theoretical framework and empirical tests using individual level data from 14 Latin American countries to show that invalid voting in presidential contests is used by individuals, particularly those high in knowledge, to protest poor government performance. However, invalid voting is not, on balance, an anti-system behavior. While political alienation differentially predicts invalid voting in countries with mandatory vote laws, the link between performance assessments and self-reported invalid voting is consistent across various contextual features that scholars link to invalid voting behavior.

When committees make decisions, voting rules are coupled with one of three disclosure rules: open voting, in which each committee member's individual vote is revealed; anonymous voting, in which only an anonymized tally is publicized; and secret voting, in which only the outcome is disclosed. I focus on strategic voters who have a preference for strategic ambiguity, and show that the amount of disclosure may have a non-monotonic effect on both the accuracy of the decision and the welfare of the voters. In particular, anonymous voting can yield both lower accuracy and higher welfare than both open and secret voting.

A jury of experts is often convened to decide between two states of Nature relevant to a managerial decision. For example, a legal jury decides between “innocent” and “guilty”, while an economic jury decides between “high” and “low” growth when there is an investment decision. Usually the jurors vary in their abilities to determine the actual state. When the jurors make their collective decision by sequential majority voting, the order of voting in terms of juror ability can affect the optimal probability Q of reaching a correct verdict. We show that when the jury has size three, Q is maximized if the juror of median ability votes first. When voting in this order, sequential voting can close more than 50% of the gap (in terms of Q ) between simultaneous voting and the verdict that would be reached without voting if the jurors’ private information were made public. Our results have implications for larger juries, where we answer an age-old question by showing that voting by seniority (decreasing ability order) is significantly better than by anti-seniority (increasing ability order). To obtain our new results we introduce a richer notion of private information. Instead of the binary information assumed since Condorcet (for “innocent” or “guilty”), we give each juror a number in interval [ − 1 , + 1 ] with larger values indicating stronger signals for “innocent”.

Conventional political wisdom holds that policies that make voting easier will increase turnout and ultimately benefit Democratic candidates. We challenge this assumption, questioning the ability of party strategists to predict which changes to election law will advantage them. Drawing on previous research, we theorize that voting laws affect who votes in diverse ways depending on the specific ways that they reduce the costs of participating. We assemble datasets of county-level vote returns in the 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential elections and model these outcomes as a function of early voting and registration laws, using both cross-sectional regression and difference-in-difference models. Unlike Election Day registration, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the results show that early voting generally helps Republicans. We conclude with implications for partisan manipulation of election laws.

This paper explores ethical issues raised by quadratic voting. We compare quadratic voting to majority voting from two ethical perspectives: the perspective of utilitarianism and that of democratic theory. From a utilitarian standpoint, the comparison is ambiguous: if voter preferences are independent of wealth, then quadratic voting outperforms majority voting, but if voter preferences are polarized by wealth, then majority voting may be superior. From the standpoint of democratic theory, we argue that assessments in terms of efficiency are too narrow. Voting institutions and political institutions more generally face a legitimacy requirement. We argue that in the presence of inequalities of wealth, any vote buying mechanism, including quadratic voting, will have a difficult time meeting this requirement.

Objective We investigate the phenomenon of municipal-level strategic voting in a high-profile mayoral election with a nonpartisan ballot. The rate of strategic voting is calculated, and we investigate whether different types of anti-candidate attitudes (based on policy or personality) affect strategic behavior. Methods We use survey data from the 2014 Toronto Election Study. Results The estimated rate of strategic voting was 1.3 percent. Among those who did cast a strategic ballot, we find that anti-candidate attitudes did not affect the likelihood of voting strategically—until the source of the dislike is considered, at which point electors who dislike a candidate on the basis of personality are shown to be more likely to cast their ballots strategically. Conclusions Strategic voting was minimal, and did not affect the election outcome. The type of dislike toward a candidate (either on the basis of policy or personality) affects strategic behavior.

We consider approval-based committee voting, i.e. the setting where each voter approves a subset of candidates, and these votes are then used to select a fixed-size set of winners (committee). We propose a natural axiom for this setting, which we call justified representation (JR). This axiom requires that if a large enough group of voters exhibits agreement by supporting the same candidate, then at least one voter in this group has an approved candidate in the winning committee. We show that for every list of ballots it is possible to select a committee that provides JR. However, it turns out that several prominent approval-based voting rules may fail to output such a committee. In particular, while Proportional Approval Voting (PAV) always outputs a committee that provides JR, Reweighted Approval Voting (RAV), a tractable approximation to PAV, does not have this property. We then introduce a stronger version of the JR axiom, which we call extended justified representation (EJR), and show that PAV satisfies EJR, while other rules we consider do not; indeed, EJR can be used to characterize PAV within the class of weighted PAV rules. We also consider several other questions related to JR and EJR, including the relationship between JR/EJR and core stability, and the complexity of the associated algorithmic problems., Preliminary version was presented at AAAI 2015

Majority voting is the most ancient, primitive, divisive and inaccurate measure of collective opinion ever invented. Yet many people believe it to be the very foundation of democracy. The consequences are widespread. Firstly, the outcomes of binary referendums are often held to be “the will of the people”. Secondly, in the wake of general elections, the new intake of elected representatives then forms a majority administration, with some of them having all the power while others have none. And thirdly, in numerous plural societies, ethno- religious minorities/majorities feel justified in resorting to violence against that which they perceive to be majority/minority oppression. Accordingly, this article first compares binary voting with other decision-making voting procedures before then discussing what could be the methodology, the implications and the potential consequences of a more accurate non-majoritarian procedure.

Austen-Smith and Banks (1996) showed that sincere/informative voting is not typically an equilibrium of the Condorcet voting model when the size of the electorate is large. Here, we reverse their finding by adding a third type of voter—one that receives no information in favor of either of the alternatives—as well as global uncertainty about the probability that each voter is such a “no evidence type.” The expected number of no evidence type voters can be arbitrarily small; nevertheless, if the electorate is large enough, then each of the two standard Condorcet types votes sincerely in every nondegenerate type-symmetric equilibrium.

We compare two mechanisms to implement a simple binary choice, e.g. adopt one of two proposals. We show that when neither alternative is ex ante preferred, simple majority voting cannot implement the first best outcome. We introduce a simple bidding mechanism where votes can be bought at a quadratic cost and voters receive rebates equal to the average of others' payments. This mechanism is budget-balanced, individually rational, and fully efficient in the limit. Moreover, the mechanism redistributes from those that gain from the outcome to those that lose and everyone is better off under bidding compared to voting. We test the two mechanisms in the lab using an environment with “moderate” and “extremist” voters. The observed efficiency losses under voting are close to theoretical predictions and significantly larger than under bidding. Because of redistribution, the efficiency gain from bidding benefits mostly the moderate voters.

This paper reports on the results of a series of experimental laboratory elections. The novelty of the design allows me to study both coordination failures and coordination efficiency in a repeated-game, divided majority setting. I assess and compare the performance of three voting mechanisms, Approval Voting, Borda Count, and Plurality Voting under two information structures. Voters either know the preference structure in the electorate or hold no information regarding other voters' preferences. With enough experience, the majority is frequently able to solve the coordination problem and coordination failure rates are fairly low across voting methods and information structures. The multi-vote systems Approval Voting and Borda Count dissolve information imperfections effectively and allow the majority to coordinate efficiently, independently of the underlying information structure. The level of coordination efficiency under Plurality Voting crucially depends on available information. When voters are uninformed about the preference structure in the electorate, the majority frequently fails to implement the efficient outcome. This low level of coordination efficiency is costly and decreases total welfare.

Standard economic reasoning assumes that people vote instrumentally—i.e., that the sole motivation to vote is to influence the outcome of an election. In contrast, voting is expressive if voters derive utility from the very act of expressing support for one of the options by voting for it, and this utility is independent of whether the vote affects the outcome. This chapter surveys experimental tests of expressive voting with a particular focus on the low-cost theory of expressive voting. The evidence for the low-cost theory of expressive voting is mixed.

Most accounts of coalition voting are based on instrumental reasoning. However, coalition voting might also be the result of expressive motivations. Using the case of the FDP, this article studies the impact of a varying degree of coalition voting in the German federal elections of 2009 and 2013. According to theories of instrumental coalition voting, there should have been more ‘threshold insurance voting’ at the 2013 election, as the FDP was actually in danger of not crossing the threshold. Yet it is found that there was considerably less coalition voting in 2013 than in the 2009 election. The analysis suggests that a more comprehensive account of coalition voting is needed that considers not only instrumental reasoning but also expressive coalition voting. Taking into account expressive motivations for coalition voting helps to explain the tremendous decline of the FDP vote share in the 2013 German federal election.

We compare approval voting with other scoring rules for environments with common values and private information. For finite electorates, the best equilibrium under approval voting is superior to plurality rule or negative voting. For large electorates, if any scoring rule yields a sequence of equilibria that efficiently aggregates information, then approval voting must do so as well.

In the mid-1990s, Brazil introduced electronic voting technology that reduced residual ballots and consequently expanded de facto enfranchisement. We employ a regression discontinuity design similar to that of previous studies of the Brazilian electronic voting technology to show that electronic technology also caused a sharp rise in party label votes (votos de legenda) that can only be explained by voting error. We show that this error offsets a large portion of the gains in enfranchisement, highlighting the fact that even generally positive changes in voting procedures can have negative effects. Our results also suggest that party label votes should not be considered a measure of party strength in the Brazilian context.

The aim of this study was to understand how voters’ perceptions of voting system security might be impacted by the addition of actual security features and fake security features (i.e., security theater) to a voting method. In the context of voting, positive perceptions of security might be more important than security itself because voters must feel voting systems are safe enough to keep their votes secure and anonymous, or else they might choose to avoid participating in an election—potentially impacting election outcomes. To investigate this problem, 90 Rice University undergraduate students participated in a mock election using one of three systems, each associated with differing levels of security: a standard paper ballot, a paper ballot enhanced by end-to-end (e2e) security mechanisms, and a paper ballot that included fake security mechanisms to give the feeling of enhanced security without actually making the system safer. After voting, each participant completed a survey that included questions about voting system security to understand if one system was perceived to be more secure than another. In this study, participants rated the paper voting method with advanced e2e security to be the most secure; both the traditional paper ballot and security theater ballot were found to be the least secure. In summary, the advanced security features positively impacted voters’ perceptions of system security—indicating that people accurately assessed the safety of the provided voting method. This finding is promising and suggests that during real elections, there is the potential for voters to assess accurately a system’s security and then act-on and make decisions based on this information.

This article studies invalid voting, which has received very little attention so far, given the broad interest and substantial relevance of voting behaviour research. Existing evidence is mostly limited to rather specific and hardly representative countries. Yet, the extent of invalid ballots is not negligible. Despite undemanding electoral rules, more invalid votes are cast in German general elections than votes for niche parties. Against this backdrop, the article describes prevalence of invalid voting in the mixed electoral system of Germany and tests explanations of its variation between constituencies. Analysing data from the most recent Bundestag Election, results give clear support to politico-institutional explanations: voters are more willing to waste their vote if second-order elections are held concurrently. Specifically under the plurality rule, more (first) votes are wasted if there are large shares for parties without direct candidates and many competing candidates.

In this paper, we develop a method based on the idea of pairwise voting to rank projects or candidates and incorporate in the ranking process how strongly the referees/voters feel about the comparisons they make. Voting is a modified form of ranking and all the votes are equally important. However, there are situations similar to voting in which the votes are not just ordinal but each voter expresses an intensity of preference for the different candidates, e.g., ranking projects for funding. We show that our method yields the same results as ordinal voting in large populations when the intensity of preferences becomes extreme. Voting with intensity of preferences does not violate democracy but soften the stand of voters and allows for consideration of the diversity of issues involved in voting.

The connection between the economy and vote choice continues to garner interest both in the academic and popular press. To isolate the effects of economic considerations, we develop a laboratory experiment that allows us to vary these considerations at three levels: the individual, community, and national economy. Choices by policymakers directly affect outcomes at each of these levels, allowing us to test for egotropic, “communotropic,” and sociotropic voting, as well as examine information search. We observe significant demand for information and that demand decreases with the complexity of the environment. Moreover, information demand is positively associated with other-regarding behavior.

We generalize Borgers’ (Am Econ Rev 94:57–66, 2004) results to a broad class of power sharing electoral systems. We show that voluntary voting under a power sharing regime Pareto dominates both random decision making and compulsory voting. We also show, however, that voluntary voting is not socially optimal, as individuals vote too frequently.

Human factors/ergonomics (HF/E) can play a role in improving equal opportunity in U.S. voting through the redesign of inefficient voting processes that lead to low voter turnout. This article, which derives from the authors’ winning entry in the HFES 2014 “Voting Systems of Tomorrow” competition, outlines HF/E-driven recommendations for improving the American voting process. These recommendations include a “one-stop shop” for all voting-related information, personalized voter accounts, appointment systems, and several ballot design suggestions. Implementation of these recommendations, on any level, has the potential to improve the proficiency of polling places, lower all-too-common lengthy wait times, and ensure that ballots are accessible to all voters.

Using the concept of good governance, this article assesses how voting rules in the World Bank Group's primary loan facility determine members’ ability to influence the formation of winning coalitions in the Executive Board. In weighted voting systems, the percentage of votes held by an actor does not adequately measure the ability of that actor to affect outcomes because voting weights do not account for either the possible number of coalitions that may form or the number of votes needed to pass a resolution. In short, weighted voting systems cannot be straightforwardly analysed with reference to voting weights but instead require the determination of relative voting power. Using multiple measures of a priori voting power, data are presented before and after recent voice reforms. Results indicate that the United States, as expected, holds the largest share of voting power. Also, as expected, most borrowing members have little voting power. Unexpectedly, in several voting groups a single member is able to ensure its election to the Board. Hence, other members of these voting groups have no formal influence on the Board. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of voting power analysis for the concept of good governance within the World Bank.

Various electronic voting channels have been introduced across a range of countries. In some countries these new channels have proved uncontroversial, while in others, they remain contentious and have even been abandoned. Relatively little is known about whether and why voters have confidence in new and old voting channels. Australia provides a useful case for researching these issues, since it is a mature democracy in which election processes and outcomes are widely accepted. The 2013 Australian Election Study results show that in this context, voters have most confidence in paper-based voting and least in voting via smartphones. Positive political attachments, ease of voting and familiarity with technology are all associated with higher levels of confidence in voting channels.

We theoretically and experimentally study voter behavior in a setting characterized by plurality rule and mandatory voting. Voters choose from three options. We are interested in the occurrence of strategic voting in an environment where Condorcet cycles may occur and focus on how information about the preference distribution affects strategic behavior. We also vary the relative importance of the second preferred option. Quantal response equilibrium analysis is used to analyze the game and derive predictions. Our results indeed show that strategic voting arises. Its extent depends on (i) information availability; (ii) the relative importance of the intermediate candidate; (iii) the electorate’s relative support for one’s preferred candidate; (iv) the relative position of the plurality-supported candidate in one’s preference ordering. Our results show that information serves as a coordination device where strategic voting does not harm the plurality-preferred candidate’s chances of winning. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10683-015-9443-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

A recent literature has found a positive relationship between the disproportionality of the electoral system and the convergence of parties’ positions. Such a relationship depends crucially on the assumption that voting is sincere. We show that, when voters are players in the game and not simply automata that vote for their favorite party, two policy-motivated parties always take extreme positions in equilibrium.

International audience; During the first round of the 2012 French presidential election, participants in an in situ experiment were invited to vote according to " evaluative voting " , which involves rating the candidates using a numerical scale. Various scales were used: (0,1), (-1,0,1), (0,1,2), and (0,1,...,20). The paper studies scale calibration effects, i.e., how individual voters adapt to the scale, leading to possibly different election outcomes. The data show that scales are not linearly equivalent, even if individual ordinal preferences are not inconsistent. Scale matters, notably because of the symbolic power of negative grades, which does not affect all candidates uniformly.

Compulsory voting is an underexposed factor of the electoral system that possibly influences women’s descriptive representation. Studlar and McAllister (Eur J Polit Res 41(2):233–253, 2002) found a negative effect, but no theoretical explanations were given. We develop two possible explanations: voters who only vote because they have to are less politically sophisticated, and therefore vote less sophisticatedly, and/or they have different attitudes about women in political life. From our study, we are able to detect a gendered effect of compulsory voting in Belgium’s flexible-list PR system, but only the vote sophistication explanation is confirmed. Voters who would no longer vote without compulsory voting significantly vote more for top candidates (mostly men) and give significantly less preference votes for candidates lower down the list. This points us to the complexity of the ballot structure as an important new dimension that could help explain gendered voting effects of compulsory voting systems. Finally, since different effects for formal and descriptive representation appear, we posit that compulsory voting constitutes a dilemma for women activists.

This study suggests that certain election administration arrangements can have a modest but significant impact on the probability of voting. Using data from Module 3 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, supplemented by contextual data from the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network, I explore the effects of election timing and voter registration procedures on turnout in 30 democracies. I show that when voter registration is in the hands of an independent electoral management body, there is a greater likelihood of an individual voting. Contrary to conventional wisdom, election timing has little impact on the probability of voting. Weekend voting, polling hours, and the timing of the election during the year have no significant impact, even among young people, supposedly the beneficiaries of such arrangements. The results show the potential for certain election arrangements to stimulate turnout. They also reveal that facilitating voters by lessening voting costs is not a cure to the problem of gr...