Ballot Forms Research Articles

Prêt à Voter with Paillier encryption

It is immensely challenging to devise a voting system that guarantees both the correct reflection of the will of the voters and the secrecy of the ballots, based solely on compelling, objective evidence. In response to this challenge, various voting protocols have been proposed, typically using cryptography, that seek to base the assurance of accuracy on transparency and auditability. This approach is neatly captured by the maxim “verify the election results, not the voting system!”. Such protocols strive to achieve a new requirement, that of voter-verifiability: voters are able to confirm that their vote is accurately counted while maintaining ballot secrecy. This paper describes the concept of voter-verifiability, and it outlines a particular voting protocol, the Prêt à Voter protocol, for achieving voter-verifiability. A new version of the protocol that exploits some special features of the Paillier encryption algorithm is presented. This gives a more elegant and robust implementation of Prêt à Voter than the previous versions. In particular, the fact that Paillier encryption allows the secret key holder to recover the randomisation as well as the plaintext, enables a simplified auditing of the ballot receipts and avoids the need to provide Zero-Knowledge Proofs. The use of Verified Random Functions is proposed as a way to prevent any manipulation undermining the secrecy requirements. Finally, a new construction of the ballot forms used in the Prêt à Voter protocol is presented that allows the ballot forms to carry full permutations of the candidates rather than simple cyclic shifts of earlier, re-encryption mix versions of this protocol.

Which are the greatest recent discoveries and the greatest future challenges in nutrition?

Nutrition science aims to create new knowledge, but scientists rarely sit back to reflect on what nutrition research has achieved in recent decades. We report the outcome of a 1-day symposium at which the audience was asked to vote on the greatest discoveries in nutrition since 1976 and on the greatest challenges for the coming 30 years. Most of the 128 participants were Dutch scientists working in nutrition or related biomedical and public health fields. Candidate discoveries and challenges were nominated by five invited speakers and by members of the audience. Ballot forms were then prepared on which participants selected one discovery and one challenge. A total of 15 discoveries and 14 challenges were nominated. The audience elected Folic acid prevents birth defects as the greatest discovery in nutrition science since 1976. Controlling obesity and insulin resistance through activity and diet was elected as the greatest challenge for the coming 30 years. This selection was probably biased by the interests and knowledge of the speakers and the audience. For the present review, we therefore added 12 discoveries from the period 1976 to 2006 that we judged worthy of consideration, but that had not been nominated at the meeting. The meeting did not represent an objective selection process, but it did demonstrate that the past 30 years have yielded major new discoveries in nutrition and health.

XVII International Botanical Congress: preliminary mail vote and report of Congress action on nomenclature proposals

A preliminary guiding mail vote on nomenclature proposals is required by Provision 4(a) of Division III (Provisions for the Governance of the Code) of the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (McNeill & al. in Regnum Veg. 146. 2006). A “Synopsis of Proposals” was published in Taxon 60: 243–286. 2011. Ballot forms were distributed with the February 2011 issue of Taxon to all individual members of the International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) and mailed from Vienna in early March to other persons who were either members of a permanent nomenclature committee or authors of proposals. The deadline for return of ballots was 31 May 2011. All ballots received by that date were included in the vote count. Out of approximately 1400 ballots distributed, 140 valid ballots (10%) were returned. There were no ballots returned unsigned so none had to be disregarded. Submission was by mail (112), by fax (12), or as scanned attachments to e-mails (16). Although electronic submission was not confined to fax (as for the Vienna Congress) there was no change in the proportion using electronic means and the majority of ballots (80% of those returned) continued to be submitted in hard copy by regular mail. In all, 338 proposals to amend the Code at the Melbourne Congress were published in advance, summarized in the “Synopsis of Proposals” and included in the preliminary mail vote, by a small margin the largest number at any Congress since the Paris Congress in 1954 (see Table 1). Apart from a block of 26 proposals for editorial modification of the Glossary (App. VII), there were no special circumstances surrounding the proposals so it would seem that the general trend toward fewer proposals suggested in the report on the decisions in Vienna (McNeill & al. in Taxon 54: 1057–1064. 2005) has not been maintained. Of the 338 proposals, 190 were single-authored, 79 had two authors, 58 had three or more authors, and 11 came from The Special Committee on Electronic Publication. The tabulation below (Table 4 on p. 5 ff.) gives the result of the preliminary mail vote for each proposal, in the XVIII International Botanical Congress: Preliminary mail vote and report of Congress action on nomenclature proposals

White Voters, Black Schools: Structuring Racial Choices with a Checklist Ballot

cation of resources. This study shows how an electoral device can help overcome racial hostility generated by competition over resources, even in the Deep South. Heresthetic, according to William Riker, is the art of strategically structuring electoral processes in order to manipulate outcomes. As he writes, [W]inners induce by more than rhetorical attractions. Typically they because they have set up the situation in such a way that other people will want to join them?or will feel forced by circumstances to join them?even without any persuasion at all. And this is what heresthetic is about: structuring the world so you can win (1986, ix). Riker offers a dozen real-world examples of how heresthetical manipula? tion works, most involving legislative politics and how rules devised by sawy legislators influence their peers. But it is striking that none of his ex? amples come from elections at the mass-level, which are not so easily manipulated, in part because the rules are so much less fluid. The basic logic of heresthetic should apply to mass voting, and other political scientists have shown, in different contexts, that the form that a ballot takes can influence how votes are cast. Such things as the order in which candidates appear on a ballot (Taebel 1975; Miller and Krosnick 1998), the ability to vote party line with a single mark (Hamilton and Ladd 1996), and whether a ballot is organized by party column or office blocks (Walker 1966) can affect how people vote. Even something as simple as whether candidates are lined up in one column or two, as some Florida officials learned after the 2000 election, can affect outcomes, if only by accident. Notable about the literature on ballot forms is that the findings are so qualified. Ballot form appears to have its biggest impact among those least politically anchored and most easily manipulated. Moreover, political sci? entists have shown that the effect of ballot form is most pronounced in low-information situations where the usual cues, like party identification and incumbency, are unavailable: nonpartisan elections, party primaries, open seat elections, multi-member legislative elections, and races at the bottom of the ballot. As Miller and Krosnick summarize their findings

"A Place on the Ballot": Fusion Politics and Antifusion Laws

ONLY IN RECENT YEARS have historians seriously investigated the institutional framework of the American electoral system and begun to examine the political effects of ballot forms, voting systems, and suffrage requirements. In particular, some scholars have sought to explain the dramatic changes in political behavior that occurred around the turn of this century as unintended consequences of reforms in the structural properties of the electoral system rather than as a reflection of any larger development. While illuminating the political results of such institutional changes, these scholars have largely ignored the political context within which the changes evolved. Thus, they have regarded those structural modifications as essentially apolitical or nonpartisan and have sharply rejected any view that change stemmed from an antidemocratic conspiracy to control the political system.' Yet, at least one little-known development in the

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