Real-world Elections Research Articles

Corrupted Votes and Rule Compliance

Allegations of voter fraud accompany many real-world elections. How does electoral malpractice affect the acceptance of elected institutions? Using an online experiment in which participants distribute income according to majority-elected rules, we show that those who experience vote buying or voter disenfranchisement during the election are subsequently less likely to voluntarily comply with a rule. On average, the detrimental impact of electoral malpractice on compliance is of the same magnitude as removing the election altogether and imposing a rule exogenously. Our experiment shows how corrupting democratic processes impacts economic behavior and sheds light on factors that may underlie “rule legitimacy.” (JEL C90, D63, D72, D73, D83)

Improving the Security of United States Elections with Robust Optimization

The preservation of democracy hinges on the reality and perception that votes in elections are counted properly. In the paper “Improving the Security of United States Elections with Robust Optimization,” Crimmins, Halderman, and Sturt provide a low-cost approach to reducing the security risks of voting machines that are used to scan ballots and count votes. Their approach consists of applying robust optimization to a century-old testing procedure called logic and accuracy testing (LAT), which is performed by election officials on each voting machine before each election. The authors show that their robust optimization approach is guaranteed to detect any misconfiguration of voting machines that would cause votes to be swapped across candidates. Applying their approach to Michigan’s November 2022 election, the authors show that their approach to LAT would have only required a 1.2% increase in cost to election officials compared with current practice. Their approach, which is forthcoming in the Societal Impact section, has been successfully piloted in real-world elections by the Michigan Bureau of Elections since Summer 2023 as a cost-efficient way to enhance election security and public trust in election outcomes.

Monotonicity anomalies in Scottish local government elections

The single transferable vote (STV) voting method is used to elect multiple candidates in ranked-choice elections. One weakness of STV is that it fails multiple fairness criteria related to monotonicity and no-show paradoxes. We analyze 1079 local government STV elections in Scotland to estimate the frequency of such monotonicity anomalies in real-world elections, and compare our results with prior empirical and theoretical research about the rates at which such anomalies occur. In 62 of the 1079 elections we found some kind of monotonicity anomaly. We generally find that anomaly rates are similar to prior empirical research and much lower than what most theoretical research has found. Most STV anomalies we find are the first of their kind to be documented in real-world multiwinner elections.

How efficient are replay attacks against vote privacy? A formal quantitative analysis1

Replay attacks are among the most well-known attacks against vote privacy. Many e-voting systems have been proven vulnerable to replay attacks, including systems like Helios that are used in real practical elections. Despite their popularity, it is commonly believed that replay attacks are inefficient but the actual threat that they pose to vote privacy has never been studied formally. Therefore, in this paper, we precisely analyze for the first time how efficient replay attacks really are. We study this question from commonly used and complementary perspectives on vote privacy, showing as an independent contribution that a simple extension of a popular game-based privacy definition corresponds to a strong entropy-based notion. Our results demonstrate that replay attacks can be devastating for a voter’s privacy even when an adversary’s resources are very limited. We illustrate our formal findings by applying them to a number of real-world elections, showing that a modest number of replays can result in significant privacy loss. Overall, our work reveals that, contrary to a common belief, replay attacks can be very efficient and must therefore be considered a serious threat.

Ballot Length in Instant Runoff Voting

Instant runoff voting (IRV) is an increasingly-popular alternative to traditional plurality voting in which voters submit rankings over the candidates rather than single votes. In practice, elections using IRV often restrict the ballot length, the number of candidates a voter is allowed to rank on their ballot. We theoretically and empirically analyze how ballot length can influence the outcome of an election, given fixed voter preferences. We show that there exist preference profiles over k candidates such that up to k-1 different candidates win at different ballot lengths. We derive exact lower bounds on the number of voters required for such profiles and provide a construction matching the lower bound for unrestricted voter preferences. Additionally, we characterize which sequences of winners are possible over ballot lengths and provide explicit profile constructions achieving any feasible winner sequence. We also examine how classic preference restrictions influence our results—for instance, single-peakedness makes k-1 different winners impossible but still allows at least Ω(√k). Finally, we analyze a collection of 168 real-world elections, where we truncate rankings to simulate shorter ballots. We find that shorter ballots could have changed the outcome in one quarter of these elections. Our results highlight ballot length as a consequential degree of freedom in the design of IRV elections.

Gender and LGBT Affinity: The Case of Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne

AbstractWhen a party selects an out lesbian as its leader, do women and LGBT people evaluate that leader more positively? And do they become more likely to vote for that party? We answer these questions using the case of Kathleen Wynne, premier of Ontario, Canada, from 2013 to 2018. We draw on four large-sample surveys conducted by Ipsos before and after the 2011 and 2014 Ontario elections. We compare shifts in best premier choice and vote choice among non-LGBT men, non-LGBT women, LGBT men, and LGBT women from 2011 to 2014. We find gender and LGBT affinity in leader evaluations. However, we find that only non-LGBT women and LGBT men were more likely to vote Liberal after Wynne became leader. This article contributes to research on affinity by examining LGBT affinity in a real-world election and the intersection of gender and LGBT affinity.

An Examination of Ranked-Choice Voting in the United States, 2004–2022

ABSTRACT From the perspective of social choice theory, ranked-choice voting (RCV) is known to have many flaws. RCV can fail to elect a Condorcet winner and is susceptible to monotonicity paradoxes and the spoiler effect, for example. We use a database of 185 American ranked-choice elections for political office from the years 2004 to 2022 to investigate empirically how frequently RCV’s deficiencies manifest in practice. Our general finding is that RCV’s weaknesses are rarely observed in real-world elections, with the exception that ballot exhaustion frequently causes majoritarian failures.

Gauging Gerrymandering in Pennsylvania

There is currently no widely accepted standard method to determine whether gerrymandering has occurred. To determine a cutoff for unreasonable gerrymandering, simulating collections of districting plans in the absence of partisan bias has been proposed. In simulation-based methods, real-world election outcomes are compared to results from simulated districting plans. Here, a simulation method that creates possible districts in continuous space is proposed. Existing methods use preliminary spatial discretization of the state to perform simulations. This spatial discretization can result in biased estimates, which could lead to inaccurate conclusions regarding gerrymandering. We use our continuous-space method to analyze the political districts in Pennsylvania. All of our simulated elections result in fewer than 13 Republican seats, indicating that the districting plan used in Pennsylvania prior to 2018 was likely gerrymandered. This finding agrees with and confirms the results of simulation-based discrete-space gerrymandering studies without the presence of discretization bias.

Approval voting under dichotomous preferences: A catalogue of characterizations

Approval voting allows every voter to cast a ballot of approved alternatives and chooses the alternatives with the largest number of approvals. Due to its simplicity and superior theoretical properties, it is a serious contender for use in real-world elections. We support this claim by giving eight characterizations of approval voting. All our results involve the consistency axiom, which requires choices to be consistent across different electorates. In addition, we consider strategyproofness, agreement with majority opinions, independence of cloned alternatives, and invariance under removing inferior alternatives. We prove our results by reducing them to a single base theorem, for which we give a simple and intuitive proof.

Using Conjoint Experiments to Analyze Election Outcomes: The Essential Role of the Average Marginal Component Effect

AbstractPolitical scientists have increasingly deployed conjoint survey experiments to understand multidimensional choices in various settings. In this paper, we show that the average marginal component effect (AMCE) constitutes an aggregation of individual-level preferences that is meaningful both theoretically and empirically. First, extending previous results to allow for arbitrary randomization distributions, we show how the AMCE represents a summary of voters’ multidimensional preferences that combines directionality and intensity according to a probabilistic generalization of the Borda rule. We demonstrate why incorporating both the directionality and intensity of multi-attribute preferences is essential for analyzing real-world elections, in which ceteris paribus comparisons almost never occur. Second, and in further empirical support of this point, we show how this aggregation translates directly into a primary quantity of interest to election scholars: the effect of a change in an attribute on a candidate’s or party’s expected vote share. These properties hold irrespective of the heterogeneity, strength, or interactivity of voters’ preferences and regardless of how votes are aggregated into seats. Finally, we propose, formalize, and evaluate the feasibility of using conjoint data to estimate alternative quantities of interest to electoral studies, including the effect of an attribute on the probability of winning.

Worst-Case Voting When the Stakes Are High

We study the additive distortion of social choice functions in the implicit utilitarian model, and argue that it is a more appropriate metric than multiplicative distortion when an alternative that confers significant social welfare may exist (i.e., when the stakes are high). We define a randomized analog of positional scoring rules, and present a rule which is asymptotically optimal within this class as the number of alternatives increases. We then show that the instance-optimal social choice function can be efficiently computed. Next, we take a beyond-worst-case view, bounding the additive distortion of prominent voting rules as a function of the best welfare attainable in an instance. Lastly, we evaluate the additive distortion of a range of rules on real-world election data.

Predicting Vote Choice and Election Outcomes from Ballot Wording: The Role of Processing Fluency in Low Information Direct Democracy Elections

ABSTRACT Two laboratory studies (N = 240) were designed to explain and predict how people make decisions in low-information political environments. Guided by feelings-as-information theory, it was argued that when direct democracy ballot issues do not receive any campaign expenditures and are not about moral/civic issues, voters are likely to encounter these ballots for the first time in the voting booth. And when this is the case, how these ballots are written should affect vote choice. In support of study hypotheses, it was found that the difficulty of the words on the ballot affected people’s processing fluency, defined as the ease with which people processed the information presented. In turn, self-reports of processing fluency influenced vote choice. Specifically, easier texts were more likely to be supported and difficult texts were more likely to be opposed or abstained from voting on. As hypothesized, this relationship was mediated through self-reports of processing fluency. Additionally, to demonstrate the external validity of this process, it was found that the voting results obtained in the two laboratory studies replicated real-world election results 86% of the time. These results offer communicative and psychological insight into how communication affects information processing, and how these processing experiences inform political decisions of consequence to everyday life.

Is Nine Too Much? How the Gender Composition of State Supreme Courts Influences Support for Female Candidates

Women may have broken the glass ceiling in terms of appointments or election to the highest courts in the U.S. but barriers still exist. In this study, we explore whether voters who have the opportunity to select state supreme court justices account for gender composition when deciding whether to support a female candidate. We test this proposition using data from the Judicial Elections Database Initiative and two online experiments. Our own analysis across both the real-world elections and our experiments reveals that voters are not significantly affected by gender diversity on the court when deciding whether to support a judicial female candidate, even when those levels are at an extreme.

TRENDS:Following the Money? How Donor Information Affects Public Opinion about Initiatives

Citizens are typically uninformed about politics and know little about issues at stake in direct democracy elections. Government efforts to inform electorates include requiring donors to initiative campaigns to report their activities and then circulating such donor information to citizens. What effects does donor information have on citizens’ opinions? We conduct a survey experiment where respondents express opinions about initiatives in a real-world election. We manipulate whether they receive donor information, party cues, policy information from a nonpartisan expert, or no additional information. We find that donor information influences citizens’ opinions in the aggregate, with effects comparable to those of party cues and policy information. However, donor information has negligible effects on uninformed citizens, who have difficulty inferring donors’ policy interests and connecting them to their own. These results underscore the potential benefits of efforts to inform electorates via disclosure laws and highlight disparities in their effectiveness for informed and uninformed citizens.

A Regression Discontinuity Design for Studying Divided Government

AbstractThe regression discontinuity design (RDD) is a valuable tool for identifying causal effects with observational data. However, applying the traditional electoral RDD to the study of divided government is challenging. Because assignment to treatment in this case is the result of elections to multiple institutions, there is no obvious single forcing variable. Here, we use simulations in which we apply shocks to real-world election results in order to generate two measures of the likelihood of divided government, both of which can be used for causal analysis. The first captures the electoral distance to divided government and can easily be utilized in conjunction with the standard sharp RDD toolkit. The second is a simulated probability of divided government. This measure does not easily fit into a sharp RDD framework, so we develop a probability restricted design (PRD) which relies upon the underlying logic of an RDD. This design incorporates common regression techniques but limits the sample to those observations for which assignment to treatment approaches “as-if random.” To illustrate both of our approaches, we reevaluate the link between divided government and the size of budget deficits.

Do Voters Prefer Just Any Descriptive Representative? The Case of Multiracial Candidates

Although scholars of representation have examined variation in voter support conditional on shared demographic traits, we know little about how voters respond to candidates who belong to multiple racial categories. Multiracial candidates challenge how we think about and study representation. I theorize that multiracial categories provide mixed information about how well a candidate adheres to group norms of identity, resulting in a multiracial advantage across groups, but a disadvantage within groups. A conjoint survey experiment on 786 White, Black, Asian, and Hispanic voters and a separate analysis of support for a multiracial candidate in a real-world election support these claims. Thus, multiracial candidates have the advantage of building coalitions with voters from other groups, but they are disadvantaged when appealing to co-racials with strong racial identities. These findings demonstrate that future research on representation must engage multiracial elites.

Borda paradox in the 2017 Iranian presidential election: empirical evidence from opinion polls

Different voting paradoxes identified by social choice theorists have rarely been documented in real-world elections. The collected data from the opinion polls in the 2017 Iranian presidential election provides substantial empirical evidence indicating that during the electoral campaigns, strong Borda paradox (the Condorcet loser wins plurality.) and weak Borda paradox (An alternative that is not the Condorcet winner wins plurality.) have occurred. At the same time, there was no evidence of a Condorcet paradox, i.e., a cycle among the top three candidates. The results support the empirical relevance of theoretical paradoxes in social choice and a call for the importance of voting procedures.

Emotion and Knowledge in Decision Making under Uncertainty

This paper presents four incentivised experiments analysing jointly the separate role of immediate integral emotions and knowledge in individual decision making under ambiguity. Reactions to a natural source of uncertainty (i.e., forthcoming real-world election results) were measured using both computed decision weights derived from individual choices and judgmental probabilities determined from the subjects’ estimated likelihood of election outcomes. This study used self-reports to measure emotions aroused by the prospective election victory of a party/coalition of parties, and both self-assessed and actual competence to measure knowledge of politics. This paper found evidence of both preference for ambiguity in the gain domain and of likelihood insensitivity, namely the tendency to overweight unlikely events and to underweight likely events. This paper also shows that a superior knowledge of politics was associated with a preference for ambiguity (i.e., the elevation of the decision weighting function for gains). Both stronger positive emotions and superior knowledge generally have asymmetric effects on likelihood insensitivity (i.e., the curvature of the decision weighting function), each being associated separately with higher overweighting of unlikely election outcomes.

Primarily about Primaries

Much of the social choice literature examines direct voting systems, in which voters submit their ranked preferences over candidates and a voting rule picks a winner. Real-world elections and decision-making processes are often more complex and involve multiple stages. For instance, one popular voting system filters candidates through primaries: first, voters affiliated with each political party vote over candidates of their own party and the voting rule picks a candidate from each party, which then compete in a general election.We present a model to analyze such multi-stage elections, and conduct the first quantitative comparison (to the best of our knowledge) of the direct and primary voting systems with two political parties in terms of the quality of the elected candidate. Our main result is that every voting rule is guaranteed to perform almost as well (i.e., within a constant factor) under the primary system as under the direct system. Surprisingly, the converse does not hold: we show settings in which there exist voting rules that perform significantly better under the primary system than under the direct system.

Consensus decision models for preferential voting with abstentions

Abstract Proper use of the data envelopment analysis (DEA) for aggregating preferential rankings helps improve efficiency of a voting system. It has been observed that many recent elections often have low turnouts, a large number of abstentions and invalid ballots. If these voters can be influenced to cast their votes for or against a candidate, it is understandable that the voting result can be quite different. The purpose of this research is to incorporate abstentions into preferential voting models. To this end, we first introduce a preferential voting DEA model with abstentions, in which the raw votes are expressed as interval values and the width of the interval characterizes the number of uncertain votes, the objective function is to maximize a candidate’s weighted voting score, and the constraints put restrictions on the place weights to ensure a proper importance order of different places. Secondly, given the fact that opinion leaders often employ different means such as social media and advertisement to influence voters in real-world elections, we explicitly incorporate these opinion leaders/brokers as a moderator into a preferential voting model with abstentions and introduce a moderator-involved-consensus preferential voting (MICPV) model. This model aims to capture the moderator’s influences on the uncertain voters from a consensus perspective. The optimal allocation of all uncertain votes allows the moderator to maximize his/her influence over the voters to achieve the minimum deviation between his/her expected and the aggregate scores of the candidates. At the optimality, for those candidates where a complete consensus is achievable, the model identifies the optimal allocation scheme. We also analyze the economic significance of the MICPV model.