Polling Sites Research Articles

Shelby County v. Holder and Changes in Voting Behavior

In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which required jurisdictions with histories of voter disenfranchisement to receive federal preclearance before altering voting laws. Since Shelby, 1688 polling sites across 13 states have closed. Utilizing a sample of eligible voters from the Current Population Survey, I first predict the likelihood of voting. Then, I analyze how Shelby has influenced the likelihood of ballot box access issues among non-voters. Overall voter turnout is 0.9pp lower in post- Shelby elections. Black eligible voters are 5.4pp less likely to vote after Shelby. However, Shelby is not associated with a higher likelihood of ballot box access issues. While the mechanisms through which Shelby affects voting behavior remain inconclusive, Shelby is significantly associated with widespread voter disenfranchisement. These findings are relevant for policymakers in creating a revised preclearance formula to curb voter disenfranchisement.

Damaging democracy? Security provision and turnout in Afghan elections†

AbstractIn emerging democracies, elections are encouraged as a route to democratization. However, not only does violence often threaten these elections, but citizens often view as corrupt the security forces deployed to combat violence. We examine the effects of such security provision. In Afghanistan's 2010 parliamentary election, polling centers with similar histories of pre‐election violence unintentionally received different deployments of the Afghan National Police, enabling identification of police's effects on turnout. Using data from the universe of polling sites and various household surveys, data usually unavailable in conflict settings, we estimate increases in police presence decreased voter turnout by an average of 30%. Our results adjudicate between competing theoretical mechanisms through which security forces could affect turnout, and show behavior is not driven by voter anticipation of election‐day violence. This highlights a pitfall for building government legitimacy via elections in weakly institutionalized and conflict‐affected states.

Repurposing Digital Devices: Using Web-based Polling Sites as Vehicles for Classroom Participation

Repurposing Digital Devices: Using Web-based Polling Sites as Vehicles for Classroom Participation

Repurposing Digital Devices: Using Web-based Polling Sites as Vehicles for Classroom Participation

Repurposing Digital Devices: Using Web-based Polling Sites as Vehicles for Classroom Participation

The Effects of Election Festivals on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment Conducted During a Presidential Election

During the final days of the 2017 general election, Civic Nation coordinated a series of non-partisan election festivals designed to encourage voter turnout in targeted precincts across the country. Previous experimental research conducted in low-salience elections (Addonizio, Green and Glaser, 2007) and presidential elections (Green and McClellan, 2017) indicates that festivals held at polling sites significantly increase voter turnout. The present study revisits the effectiveness of festivals as an inducement to voting in low- and medium-salience elections. In 2017, 104 precincts were randomly assigned to treatment or control, making the current study larger than previous experiments. Festivals appear to have had a modest positive effect on turnout in 2017; however, this effect was smaller than estimated in previous research. Heavy rains in 85% of the sites as well as limited community outreach prior to Election Day may explain the weaker treatment effects observed in 2017.

Design of Secure Electronic Voting System Using Fingerprint Biometrics and CryptoWatermarking Approach

The conventional voting scheme employs paper-based ballot to verify votes. This voting scheme is insecure due to the attributed shortcomings including ballot stuffing, ballot snatching and voter's impersonation. In this paper, we present the design and development of secure e-voting to ensure a free, fair and credible election where the preference of electorate counts. This proposed system solves the authentication, integrity and confidentiality security issues of e-voting in kiosk and poll site evoting scenarios using unimodal fingerprint biometrics and Advanced Encryption Standard based Wavelet based Crypto-watermarking Approach. The developed system solves: The possibility of blundering voter's authentication, integrity and confidentiality of vote stored in the server. The results after qualitative evaluation of the system with anti- watermarking detectors revealed that the developed secure e-voting system could serve as a platform for the delivery of credible e-election in developing countries with significant digital divides.

Faculty Members' Experiences of Cyberbullying by Students at One Canadian University: Impact and Recommendations

This two-phase mixed methods study adopted online survey and individual interview questions to explore faculty members’ experiences of cyberbullying by students at one Canadian university. Foucault's (1994) power relations theory was used to explore the power dynamic that can exist in the student-faculty relationship. The study found that cyberbullied faculty members were commonly female, over 40 years of age, English-speaking Canadian citizens, and held fulltime rank. Cyberbullying occurred namely via email, end-of-term faculty evaluation sites, and public polling sites (e.g. Ratemyprofessor.com), while students' dissatisfaction with grades was the most common precursor. Consistent with prior bullying and cyberbullying literature, this study also found that cyberbullied faculty members experienced detrimental effects, persisting from a few days to more than one year. The under-researched focus of this study advances existing workplace bullying and cyberbullying research by illuminating both the harmful implications of student-to-faculty cyberbullying, and the support measures deemed necessary by targeted individuals.

More Than Voting Booths: Accessibility of Electoral Campaigns for People with Disabilities in Ontario

Obstacles to electoral involvement for persons with a disability are not limited to inaccessible polling sites. Meeting venues, campaign offices and constituency offices are all central to the effective functioning of Canadian democracy. The purpose of this paper is to identify the extent to which the Ontario election campaign of 2011 “opened doors” to electoral participation for persons with disabilities. The study used a survey and document review approach to compose a snapshot of election and campaign accessibility in Ontario in 2011. Party leaders were polled to seek their official position on disability issues and accessibility in their campaign and their platform. Thirty individual candidates were approached from each of the 3 official parties and from 10 ridings across Ontario. Referring to the 2011 Ontario provincial election, candidates were asked about campaign offices, candidate meetings and website accessibility. Websites and campaign materials were also reviewed for the three parties for any mention of disability or accessibility. The findings from this survey suggest that there is a general lack of understanding of the imperative to achieve accessibility standards, not only of polling stations and booths, but also of political campaigns, if representative democracy in Canada is to include people with disabilities.

Sistem Pemungutan Suara Elektronik Menggunakan Model Poll Site E-Voting

General elections is a regular agenda for a democtaric state, the applied paper based voting has several drawbacks, including spoiled ballots, inaccuracy in the counting of votes and reporting of election results which tends to be slow. Therefore , it needs to develop an electronic voting system that is user friendly for Indonesian people, which will reduce confusion from the previous system changes. Electronic voting aims at increasing participation, accuracy and efficiency of election results. Electrinoc voting has its own challenges to the implementation in Indonesia, ranging from the lack of legal protection, the heterogeneous level of education, culture, soceity and the digital gaps. The model developed in this thesis is the poll site e-voting, based on the rules of General Elections Commision (KPU) as the organizer of the elections. In this model, people still go to the pools, using the ID number od ID card as a verification tool and voting at the voting booths provided. The system automatically stores the results in a database option, and after the spesified time will show both the results of the voting and other and other information required by the Commission. Voting system with a model of e-voting poll site is expected to have a good chance an a low level of risk to be applied in Indonesia. Keywords : E-voting; Poll site; Rule based; Risk.

Planning and Implementation of a Student-led Immunization Clinic

Students and faculty planned and implemented a pharmacist-led influenza clinic on election day. A needs assessment was conducted, and a core team was convened for planning and reaching out to health departments. Stakeholders helped to identify polling sites and obtain sponsorship for vaccinations. Standing orders and a protocol were considered and university legal counsel addressed potential liability issues. Volunteers were trained, and the event was promoted through media outlets. This pharmacist-led immunization clinic provided 153 vaccinations; 42 individuals received an influenza vaccination for the first time. Over 30 students and faculty members were involved in the clinic. Lessons learned, including challenges, opportunities, and practical recommendations, are provided for students and faculty pharmacists who wish to conduct similar programs.

Script Familiarity and Its Effect on CAPTCHA Usability

Many web-based services such as email, search engines, and polling sites are being abused by spammers via computer programs known as bots. This problem has bred a new research area called Human Interactive Proofs (HIP) and a testing device called CAPTCHA, which aims to protect services from malevolent attacks by distinguishing bots from human users. In the past decade, researchers have focused on developing robust and safe HIP systems but have barely evaluated their usability. To begin to fill this gap, the authors report the results of a user study conducted to determine the extent that English language proficiency affects CAPTCHA usability for users whose native language is not English. The results showed a significant effect of participants’ English language proficiency level on the time the participant takes to solve CAPTCHA, which appear to be related to multiple usability issues including satisfaction and efficiency. Yet, they found that English language proficiency level does not affect the number of errors made while entering CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA. The authors’ results have numerous implications that may inform future CAPTCHA design.

Street fight: The impact of a street sign campaign on voter turnout

Over the past two decades, there has been a resurgence in the use of field experimental methods to examine the impact of a range of get-out-the-vote tactics (Green and Gerber, 2008), continuing a tradition that dates as far back as Gosnell (1927). Scholars have investigated the impact of face-to-face canvassing, direct mail, phone calls, leafleting, and mass media (Green and Gerber, 2008), yet no field experiment of which we are aware has tested the impact of a street sign campaign on voter mobilization. This study reports the first randomized field experiment gauging the effects of a nonpartisan get-out-the-vote street sign campaign. The experiment we describe is essentially a matched-pair, cluster-randomized design conducted in the context of the November 2005 municipal elections in New York City. We identified 14 pairs of poll sites (voting locations) that were closely matched in terms of past voter turnout. One poll site in each pair was randomly assigned to be exposed to the treatment that encouraged voters to vote on the day before Election Day. The street sign intervention is found to produce higher turnout.

P3ARM-t: Privacy-Preserving Protocol for Association Rule Mining with t Collusion Resistance

The ability to mine large volumes of distributed datasets enables more precise decision making. However, privacy concerns should be carefully addressed when mining datasets distributed over autonomous sites. We propose a new cryptography-based Privacy-Preserving Protocol for Association Rule Mining with t collusion resistance (P3ARM-t), where t is the threshold of number of colluding sites. P3ARM-t is based on a distributed implementation of the Apriori algorithm. The key idea is to arbitrary assign polling sites to collect itemsets’ supports in encrypted forms using homomorphic encryption techniques. Polling sites are randomly assigned and are different for consecutive rounds of the protocol to reduce the potential for collusion. Our performance analysis shows that P3ARM-t significantly outperforms a leading existing protocol. Moreover, P3ARMt is scalable in the number of sites and the volume of data. The protocol also decreases the potential for collusion for up to t colluding sites.

Private Women/Public Acts: Petticoat Government and the Performance of Resistance

Feminists in 19th-century America performed their politics by storming taverns, holding mock elections at polling sites, and lecturing in public. These performances exacerbated fears concerning the “Woman Question” as antebellum feminists exposed gender as ritualized acts and employed performativity as a way to enact their resistance.