Election Authority Research Articles

Analyzing Misinformation Claims During the 2022 Brazilian General Election on WhatsApp, Twitter, and Kwai

Abstract This study analyzes misinformation claims sent to fact-checking organizations on WhatsApp during the 2022 Brazilian general election and compares them with content from Twitter and Kwai (a popular video-sharing application similar to TikTok). Given the democratic importance of accurate information during elections, multiple fact-checking organizations collaborated to collect and respond to misinformation via WhatsApp tiplines and power a fact-checking feature within a chatbot operated by Brazil’s election authority, the Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE). We partnered with TSE and three fact-checking organizations and collected social media data to study how misinformation claims propagate across platforms. We observed little overlap between the users of different fact-checking tiplines and a high correlation between the number of users and the amount of unique content, suggesting that WhatsApp tiplines are far from reaching a saturation point. Similarly, we also found little overlap in content across platforms, indicating the need for further research with cross-platform approaches to identify misinformation dynamics.

The threat of artificial intelligence to elections worldwide: A review of the 2024 landscape

One area that might experience an immense transformation owing to the adoption of AI is the electoral system. Artificial intelligence (AI) holds tremendous potential for enhancing polls, campaign methods, and voter registration, but it also presents substantial challenges to the integrity of elections around the globe. This article discusses the political scene of 2024 and AI's role, balancing the pros and cons of AI deployment. Case studies of nations that have implemented AI for voting purposes are presented in the article, along with an analysis of the merits and disadvantages of these systems. The article goes on to warn of the perils of AI in elections and provides solutions to these concerns. It is of the most significant necessity to secure both the security and legitimacy of voting procedures, as the employment of artificial intelligence in elections is popular. This paper asks politicians, election authorities, and people in general to handle the challenges brought by AI in elections.

SHA 512 Enhanced Secure Hash Decentralized Response System

Today a very huge lack of confidence about the current EVM/ballot response system like voting has made voting response collection in any democratic country very condemnatory. People have watched their fundamental rights which are being violated. On the other hand the other digital voting systems are also in danger due to a minimal of transparency. Most of the traditional response systems are not clear enough so as to meet today's requirements; this crucial reason makes it very sweaty for the government to come up with voters' trust. The motive behind the downfall of the traditional and current cyber voting system is that it can be easily compromised due to centralized network. The primary objective here is to counter the issues of the traditional digital voting and such response systems, which has any type of mistrust or inequality during the process of accepting responses through response systems like voting. Blockchain technology can be used in such response systems like voting to have a fair response system and reduce wrongdoing. The current physical response systems like voting have many downs in it as well as the digital voting systems are not up to the mark to be implemented on a huge scale. Such all problems raises the need for a solution to secure the democratic rights of the people. This article put-ups a framework based on up-to-date blockchain algorithm technology that provides high clarity and reliability of the system to construct a healthy relationship between response systems and election authorities. The insisted software provides a framework that can be implemented in real world to conduct voting like procedures digitally through blockchain rather than involving any physical polling stations and centralized ledger. Our proposed framework provides an extendible hashing, by using the latest consensus algorithms. The Secure Hash Algorithms applied in the voting system along with Chain Security makes the response systems more secure. Distributed ledger contracts also provide a protected connection between the user and the consensus network while running a transaction in the chain. The security of the blockchain based response system has also been discussed. In Addition to this, encryption of responses using cryptographic hash functions and prevention of exploitation attacks about 51% on the blockchain has also been elaborated. Also, the procedure for carrying out blockchain transactions during the process of response collection has been elaborated using Blockchain. Finally, the throughput performance evaluation of the proposed system shows that such a system can be deployed in a large-scale real time population.

Do local authorities take human rights seriously? Lessons from the French case

ABSTRACT The central government has the primary responsibility for the protection of human rights. However, several factors such as decentralisation raise questions about the role of local authorities in this area. Our paper examines this issue through an interdisciplinary approach, combining international law and political sociology. Our focus lies on the case of France, the ‘homeland’ of human rights: do French local elected authorities always take human rights seriously? Our research design combines qualitative and quantitative methods. After providing a background of the international legal context, this paper will present the findings on human rights local perceptions and practices of elected representatives. Human rights’ perceptions of these subnational political actors strongly depend on their educational qualifications and personal commitments. The same applies to the hierarchy that they draw between fundamental freedoms, social rights, and environmental rights. By contrast, local practices in favour of human rights vary most importantly according to the local authorities’ status and demographic weight, rather than their political hue. When human and financial resources are scarce, the goodwill showcased by local elected representatives is not sufficient to foster the proper implementation of human rights.

Формирование гражданских исполнительных комитетов в Баталпашинском отделе Кубан-ской области и основные проблемы их деятельности в 1917 году

The article covers the development of new administrations on the area of the Kuban region's Batal-pashinsky department following the February Revolution of 1917. The study focuses on elected lo-cal authorities - civil executive committees - which were established in the region immediately fol-lowing the revolutionary events. It should be emphasized that, as in the rest of the country, an unu-sual system of dual authority has emerged in the Batalpashinsky department, with administrative structures in the shape of government commissars and village atamans coexisting with the newly elected authorities. The work focuses on the key issues encountered by civil executive committees during their brief presence in the region. It was determined that the most difficult issue was the land. Within a few months, the new elected authorities, for the most part, have moved quickly from attempts to maintain the status quo in land ownership to broad support for land self-seizures of both state and private holdings.

On remote electronic voting with both coercion resistance and cast-as-intended verifiability

In this work, we study two essential but apparently contradictory properties of electronic voting systems: coercion resistance (CR) and cast-as-intended verifiability (CAI). Informally, the CR property ensures that a voter cannot prove to anybody else the vote content, which prevents vote selling and voting under duress. The CAI property ensures that a malicious voting device cannot cheat the voter and send to the ballot box an encryption of a voting option different from the one chosen by the voter.In this work, we formalize security definitions capturing both coercion resistance and cast-as-intended verification in settings without secure delivery channels between the election authority and voters. After that, we consider some previously proposed solutions aimed at providing these two properties. For some of them (that we call unsatisfactory solutions) we show why they fail to achieve some of the two properties. We then concentrate on one of the two generic solutions that we call satisfactory: we prove that it satisfies the two proposed definitions and we detail how it can be instantiated in both classical cryptographic (e.g., ElGamal ciphertexts) and quantum-resistant (e.g., using lattice-based cryptosystems) settings.

Voting Application using Blockchain Technology

Abstract: Voting plays a crucial role in democratic societies, allowing individuals to voice their opinions and shape the direction of governance. However, traditional voting systems encounter challenges regarding transparency, security, and trustworthiness. In recent years, blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution to address these issues and revolutionize the voting process. This research paper presents a novel voting application that leverages blockchain technology to enhance the integrity and efficiency of elections. By utilizing the decentralized and immutable nature of blockchain, the proposed system aims to provide a transparent and trustworthy voting process. Each vote is recorded as a transaction on the blockchain, ensuring a transparent and tamper-resistant ledger that can be verified by all participants. The implementation of smart contracts, which are self-executing and self-enforcing digital agreements, automates and streamlines the voting process. This eliminates the need for intermediaries, such as election authorities, and enables verifiable and auditable results. Additionally, the integration of cryptographic techniques further enhances the security and privacy of the voting system, safeguarding the confidentiality of voters' choices. The paper thoroughly examines the advantages and challenges associated with implementing blockchain technology in the voting domain. It explores the benefits offered by blockchain, including transparency, immutability, and decentralized governance, while also addressing concerns related to scalability, voter identification, and accessibility. Through a comprehensive analysis and evaluation, this research paper aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of blockchain-based voting systems and their potential impact on democratic processes. By harnessing the power of blockchain technology, it becomes possible to create a voting system that is more secure, transparent, and inclusive, ultimately strengthening the foundations of democracy.

An Efficient E2E Crowd Verifiable E-Voting System

Electronic voting (e-voting), compared with article voting, has advantages in several aspects. Among those benefits, the ability to audit the electoral process at every stage is one of the most desired features of an e-voting system. In Eurocrypt 2015, Kiayias, Zacharias, and Zhang proposed a new E2E verifiable e-voting system that for the first time provides E2E verifiability without relying on external sources of randomness or the random oracle model; the main advantage of such system is in the fact that election auditors need only the election transcript and the feedback from the voters to pronounce the election process unequivocally valid. Unfortunately, their system comes with a huge performance and storage penalty for the election authority (EA) compared to other e-voting systems such as Helios. The main reason is that due to the way the EA forms the proof of the tally result, it is required to <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">precompute</i> a number of ciphertexts for each voter and each possible choice of the voter. The performance penalty on the EA appears to be intrinsic to the approach: voters cannot compute an enciphered ballot themselves because there seems to be no way for them to prove that it is a valid ciphertext. In this work, we construct a new e-voting system that retains similar strong E2E characteristics (but against computational adversaries) while completely eliminating the performance and storage penalty of the EA. Our construction has similar performance to Helios and is practical. The privacy of our construction relies on the SXDH assumption over bilinear groups via complexity leveraging.

Valid Blockchain-Based E-Voting Using Elliptic Curve and Homomorphic Encryption

Improving the voting system has become a widely discussed issue. Paper-based elections are not safe because of the possibility of changing and adding ballots. Consequently, many countries use e-voting systems to ensure security, authenticity and time efficiency. Blockchain e-voting systems can be adopted to reduce fraud and increase voting access from home, especially in pandemics. This paper suggests a blockchain e-voting system that tackles two security and authentication issues. The security has been ensured using hybrid public-key cryptography; the voter information is encrypted using the regional election office elliptic public key, while the homomorphic public supreme election authority encrypts the vote. Using homomorphic encryption for voice enables the calculations of results as the authority encrypts it without revealing the vote itself. Authentication has been improved for home voting by a robust login system. This login system consists of two steps. In the first step, the voter enters the site using his unique QR code number scanned by webcam; in the second step, the system checks the voter's face using a face recognition system by web camera to be routed to the voting page. Voting public keys are also authenticated using a digital certificate schema. The system has been tested to show its efficiency and suitability in block establishment time and the encryption and key generator randomness using NIST tests.

Quantum Protocol for Electronic Voting without Election Authorities

Electronic voting is a very useful but challenging internet-based protocol that despite many theoretical approaches and various implementations with different degrees of success, remains a contentious topic due to issues in reliability and security. Here we present a quantum protocol that exploits an untrusted source of multipartite entanglement to carry out an election without relying on election authorities, simultaneous broadcasting or computational assumptions, and whose result is publicly verifiable. The level of security depends directly on the fidelity of the shared multipartite entangled quantum state, and the protocol can be readily implemented for a few voters with state-of-the-art photonic technology.

First record and distributional extension to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) of the slipper lobster Scyllarides haanii (Crustacea, Decapoda, Scyllaridae)

A male specimen of the Aesop slipper lobster Scyllarides haanii was found in the coastal vicinity of Ahu Tongariki (27°07'33"S, 109°16'37"W), Rapa Nui. Its taxonomic determination was carried out by a detailed morphological examination and a DNA barcoding identification analysis by sequencing the cytochrome oxidase subunit 1 (COX1) gene. S. haanii has a wide geographic distribution with occasional presence from the Indo-Pacific to the Hawaiian Archipelago, including the Red Sea, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Australia, Reunion, and French Polynesia; from 10 to 135 m of depth, preferably on rocky bottoms. This record extends the geographical distribution of S. haanii to Rapa Nui. It increases to five the species number of marine lobsters present on the island: a Palinuridae, Panulirus pascuensis and four Scyllaridae, Parribacus perlatus, Arctides regalis, Scyllarides roggevenni, and now S. haanii. This finding derived from the local initiative Pilotos to promote the sustainable management of coastal species, led by the Rapa Nui Sea Council ("Koro Nui o te Vaikava"), the elected authority in charge of the co-administration of Multiple Uses Marine Protected Area (MUMPA). The specimen will be deposited in the Crustacean Collection of the MNHNCL: accession number in GenBank (MW699539.1).

A Framework to Make Voting System Transparent Using Blockchain Technology

A widespread mistrust towards the traditional voting system has made democratic voting in any country very critical. People have seen their fundamental rights being violated. Other digital voting systems have been challenged due to a lack of transparency. Most voting systems are not transparent enough; this makes it very difficult for the government to gain voters&#x2019; trust. The reason behind the failure of the traditional and current digital voting system is that it can be easily exploited. The primary objective is to resolve problems of the traditional and digital voting system, which include any kind of mishap or injustice during the process of voting. Blockchain technology can be used in the voting system to have a fair election and reduce injustice. The physical voting systems have many flaws in it as well as the digital voting systems are not perfect enough to be implemented on large scale. This appraises the need for a solution to secure the democratic rights of the people. This article presents a platform based on modern technology blockchain that provides maximum transparency and reliability of the system to build a trustful relationship between voters and election authorities. The proposed platform provides a framework that can be implemented to conduct voting activity digitally through blockchain without involving any physical polling stations. Our proposed framework supports a scalable blockchain, by using flexible consensus algorithms. The Chain Security Algorithm applied in the voting system makes the voting transaction more secure. Smart contracts provide a secure connection between the user and the network while executing a transaction in the chain. The security of the blockchain based voting system has also been discussed. Additionally, encryption of transactions using cryptographic hash and prevention of attack 51% on the blockchain has also been elaborated. Furthermore, the methodology for carrying out blockchain transactions during the process of voting has been elaborated using Blockchain Finally, the performance evaluation of the proposed system shows that the system can be implemented in a large-scale population.

Public Health Services during the COVID-19 pandemic in 3 European countries: PT, EN and DE

Abstract Background Monitoring and responding to health hazards and emergencies is an Essential Public Health Operation delivered by public health services (PHS) (2). In the European Region, there is a wide range of organizational and financial models for PHS delivery to the populations, but the best approach is still largely unknown (3). This work aims to analyze PHS organization and financing and compare their health results during the COVID-19 pandemic in 3 countries: Portugal, England and Germany. Methods We searched The European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies database; GoogleScholar® for the terms “organization” and “financing” associated with PHS and Europe; OurWorldInData® for COVID-19 data. Results PHS Organization: PT has national, regional and local units with a top-down decision-making hierarchy, though information flows both ways. EN has the national health system and Public Health England (that supports autonomous local elected health authorities), with independence and little overlapping between them. DE has Federal, State, County and Municipal health actors with self-government and administrative autonomy to a certain degree. Spending on ‘preventing care' as a share of total health expenditure: PT (1,7%), DR (3,2%) and EN (5,1%). COVID-19 cases: DE showed best results while PT and EN were similar. Conclusions WHO states the most effective and efficient method of delivering PHS is through an integrated approach, rather than through vertical programmes (2), but PT vertical organization with information flowing both ways and a network of horizontal supporting PH institutions may favor needed coordinated responses during a pandemic. In geographically larger countries, exerting autonomous decisions at different levels may improve preventive measures' efficacy. This analysis adds to the previous literature that suggests the most efficient PHS are adapted to local contexts. Key messages The best PHS organization is still unknown, though adaptation to regional and local contexts seems key for better results. Greater spending on “preventive care” does not necessarily guarantee better results, suggesting PHS organization may have a more important role.

Police Union Political Communications in Canada

Abstract The political communications of police unions in the digital age deserve more attention from criminologists. This article examines the communications of two Canadian police associations in Toronto and Winnipeg. Using multimodal discourse analysis, we describe how police unions tactically engage with multiple forms of media to disseminate strategic narratives that reflect police identity and ideology. We conceptualize the mobilization of ‘thin blue line’ narratives and maintenance of a ‘blue wall of silence’ as forms of boundary work, which serve to favourably delineate the role of police in their communities while sidestepping critical views. The proliferation of digital media amplifies the unions’ capacities to influence local politics by undermining elected authorities and community activists while advancing a police-centric view of society.

City destinations, overtourism and governance

Purpose There has been limited research on the governance of cities coping with large numbers of tourists. Empirical studies of the ways in which elected authorities in cities balance the conflicting interests of the tourism stakeholders, other businesses, communities and residents. It is clear that this requires a whole of government approach, and cities generally have a wide range of expertise and powers. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses conceptual viewpoint approach. Findings As the cases of Barcelona and Venice demonstrate, they are unable to manage the flows of day visitors arriving from the surrounding region, and the airports, ports, roads and railways are managed by regional and national governments. The different functions, powers and performance of government bodies need to be researched if we are to secure a better understanding of the complex and multi-layered activity of tourism can best be governed. Originality/value This is an original viewpoint.

The Mental Element of The Crime of Fault in The Performance of The Official Jobs: Article (341) of The Iraqi Law

Faulty execution of official duties is regarded as one of the main offences that endangers elected authorities, a well-ordered public regulation, and utility that causes harm to public property and public interests. Since it is done by an individual who is performing an official work, this offence is committed by one of the workers violating the boundaries of their employment. This is enshrined in Iraqi penalty Law No. 111 of 1969 in article 341 and is deemed one of the financial and administrative corruption offences stipulated in the honesty Commission Act No. 30 of 2011 due to its extreme and significant danger and leaving traces and impacts. The consequences of this major crime and its effect on the state and community is expressed in the legal, democratic, administrative, fiscal, and social structures of the state. It is described as accidental offenses committed without criminal purpose. In this form of crime, neither initiating nor participating is possible, but both of the perpetrators are simple owners. In certain ways, this offence is analogous to the crime of willful injury to public property and interests, in addition to all other general criteria for any crime.

A Secure Digital E-Voting Using Blockchain Technology

In digital electronic voting security is always the biggest anxiety. In existing system, the EVM system used, when compare to the conventional paper ballot system EVM reduces the time for casting vote and result announcement, but still having many issues there is the risk that the election authorities can able to change or remove the vote therefore chances for violating its secrecy. The entire system may rigged by any third party. Blockchain technology provide secure electronic voting platform, which is a decentralized, peer-to-peer transaction ledger enables every vote that is casted will be consider as an individual transaction which creates transparent and secure environment for elections, where the users will be able to cast their votes only once and will be able to view the total votes casted in real time without having the permission to edit the same after election gets over. These votes will be counted and the results will then be announced. This work achieves by solving the issues of digital voting systems and a mechanism to boost the number of voters and their trust in the electoral process.

Novel technique to detect network error or modification of votes during transmission in online voting system

Major obstacles in deploying online voting system (OVS) are its susceptibility and vulnerability to attack and incompatibility to voting fundamental. Various security risks like attacks on communication network, viruses and similar attacks on voting terminals, chances of coercion etc. are associated with OVS. Trapping the electronic ballots from communication network during transmission is also an identified security problem in OVS. Attackers may try to change votes in favor of particular candidates or may try random modifications to disrupt the whole system. Errors may automatically get introduced in the communication channel too. This paper proposes a solution using “dummy voting to detect error” in electronic ballot during transmission in communication network or modification by attackers. This error and modification detection technique will assist legitimate election authorities in making decisions such as cancelling the whole or part of votes cast or approving them to be legitimate.

An Electronic Voting Scheme Based on Revised-SVRM and Confirmation Numbers

This paper improves the performance of the revised-simplified verifiable re-encryption mixnet (R-SVRM) based e-voting scheme by introducing confirmation numbers (CNs) that are used in the CN based e-voting scheme. Although CN based and R-SVRM based schemes had made e-voting schemes more practical by excluding zero knowledge proof (ZKP) that requires large volume of computations, still they are not efficient enough. Namely, the CN based scheme adopts RSA encryption functions that are not probabilistic or commutative, therefore to satisfy essential requirements of elections, extra random factors are necessary for individual votes, election authorities must sign on votes and they must keep encryption keys as their secrets. On the other hand, although the R-SVRM based scheme uses ElGamal encryption functions that are probabilistic and commutative, vote forms in it is complicated, i.e., vote forms consist of at least 3 items and they include information about candidates as exponents. The improved scheme simplifies vote forms by exploiting CNs, and extensively reduces the number of operations required for individual votes. Also, the scheme successfully satisfies all essential requirements of e-voting systems, i.e., it is endowed with features about privacy, robustness, accuracy, incoercibility and fairness as CN based and R-SVRM based schemes are.

Міжгрупові розколи в об’єднаних територіальних громадах: ризики послаблення соціальної згуртованості в децентралізованій Україні

Стаття присвячена аналізу міжгрупових розколів у сприйнятті мешканців об’єднаних територіальних громад Харківської та Чернівецької областей як потенційного чинника послаблення соціальної згуртованості на рівні локальних спільнот в Україні. Спираючись на модель емпіричного вимірювання соціальної згуртованості Дж. Чана, автор здійснює спробу її адаптації в контексті якісної соціологічної перспективи, аналізуючи дані 26 напівструктурованих інтерв’ю, проведених з місцевими громадськими активістами, депутатами місцевих рад, представниками адміністрації об’єднаних громад та експертами з питань децентралізації в обох регіонах України. Дослідження засвідчило наявність міжгрупових розколів за вісями «новостворена громада – попередня влада»; «влада громади – місцеві мешканці»; «центр-периферія»; «багаті громади – бідні громади»; «децентралізована Україна – недецентралізована Україна». Ключовим підґрунтям для формування розколів визначено соціальні нерівності, що зумовлюють «метаморфози спроможності» реформи децентралізації в Україні. Автором наголошено на актуальності початку адміністративного етапу реформи децентралізації, що сприятиме скороченню соціального розриву між децентралізованою та недецентралізованою Україною