Secret Ballot Research Articles

Does vote buying undermine confidence in ballot secrecy? Theory and experimental evidence

Abstract Why does vote buying persist under the secret ballot? We argue initiating vote-buying transactions allows politicians to undermine voter confidence in the secret ballot, and thus to induce voter compliance. Our analysis consists of three parts. First, we present evidence from a survey experiment in Mexico that shows receiving material goods from a candidate diminishes voter confidence in ballot integrity. Next, we introduce an informational theory of vote buying that explains this phenomenon. Specifically, we develop a model of vote buying as a signaling game, in which a voter who is ex ante uncertain about a politician's capacity to monitor voter behavior learns new information from the politician's actions. Finally, we test the key insights from the model in a lab experiment. Our results suggest that, under certain conditions, offering material goods to voters is sufficient to erode their confidence in ballot secrecy, making vote buying effective.

Land reform and agrarian socialism in interwar Europe: Evidence from 1930s Spain before civil war

This paper studies the effects of various types of land reform on the voting of the rural poor in a developing, largely agrarian economy such as 1930s Spain. Using municipal-level electoral results in a region with intense but heterogeneous land-related interventions, we find that permanent transfers of land had the greatest positive impact on voting for leftist candidates, followed by temporary transfers of land aimed at alleviating the problem of seasonal unemployment. Poorly planned temporary transfers of land without adequate funding for beneficiaries made the landless more vulnerable to landowner control and had the opposite result. Our results show that the secret ballot might be insufficient to guarantee the free vote of economically dependent landless laborers. They also show that land reforms with poor support for beneficiaries might backfire.

Virtual Voting in rfmos: A Procedural Odyssey at the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission

Abstract This article examines, from the perspective of international institutional law, the variety of procedural problems which arose following an online vote by secret ballot taken by the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (iotc) in 2021. By providing a detailed case-study of this novel instance of practice and the challenges it represents, this article aims to contribute to a better understanding of the institutional governance and procedural legal framework of regional fisheries management organizations (rfmo s). It first analyses the vote and the challenge to its validity. This article then constructs a taxonomy of the various procedural irregularities that were found to have occurred, the responsibility of institutional actors for their occurrence, and their legal consequences. The final substantive sections of this article examine how the iotc ultimately dealt with the situation and what potential role the available dispute settlement procedures could have had in addressing the discussed procedural irregularities.

NLRB Regional Office Engaged in “Gross Mismanagement” of Election

When it comes to maintaining union‐free status, there is no singular element that is more important than the sanctity of the secret ballot. All the efforts by both union and management representatives boil down to a simple mark and whether it will be placed in the “Yes” or “No” box. The agency entrusted by Congress to oversee that process is the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). If that agency fails to act in a manner with the trust afforded to it, the entire process is subject to scrutiny and suspicion. It is, therefore, monumental that NLRB's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) recently found that a regional office's handling of a recent election amounted to “gross mismanagement.”

Konstytucyjne zasady prawa wyborczego w wyborach samorządowych w Polsce a rozwiązania europejskie – przyczynek do dyskusji

The subject of the article is an attempt to compare the constitutional principles of holding local government elections in Poland and in other EU countries. Preliminary studies of this issue indicate that in the case of elections of the constitutive bodies of local government units, three model solutions may be indicated: (1) lack of regulation of the principles of electoral law in the constitution, which means that the ordinary legislator is left with some freedom in regulation of this issue; (2) constitution regulates a limited catalogue of the principles of electoral law (usually two or three); (3) constitution regulates a full catalogue of the four fundamental principles of electoral law (universality, equality, directness, secret ballot). Similar remarks apply to executive bodies of local self-government units. The aim of the article is to classify Poland into one of the above-mentioned models and to try to answer the question of what were the premises behind such a regulation of this issue in the Constitution of the Republic of Poland of 2 April 1997.

A Critical Analysis of the Ups and Downs of the British 1832 'Great' Reform Act

This work scrutinises the British struggle for the 1832 ‘Great’ Reform Act by exploring its ups and downs. It, in fact, aims at showing that that Reform Act does not deserve the qualifier ‘Great’ put in inverted commas. Through the historical perspective, the findings have revealed that the 1832 Reform Act took much time to be recognised and passed by Parliament, because political leaders at that time were tyrants and hated all sorts of change. In the long run of time, the bill was then adopted and became law under the masses’ pressure and upheaval. However, after its passage, the political system was slightly changed and the idea of democracy in Britain was, indeed, still a mere masquerade. There were no salaries of MPs, no secret ballot, no regular parliaments, no vote for women, no abolition of property qualification and no constituencies of the same size. It is evident that this appellation is but window dressing. So, this historical misconception should be reviewed and corrected.

Suffrage and the Secret Ballot in Eighteenth-Century London Parishes

AbstractThis article argues that pre-nineteenth-century elections at a sub-national level have an important place in the history of ‘modern’ voting practices. It does this through a discussion of unusually well-documented election disputes in eighteenth-century London parishes. Previously neglected records of litigation in the ecclesiastical courts reveal that parish elections in this period generated arguments which did not take place at a parliamentary level until the following century: arguments over votes for women, votes for religious minorities, and the secret ballot. Customary electoral rules came under increasing pressure in the early eighteenth century as London’s population grew and changed in character. In some parishes, this produced a narrowing of the traditional ratepayer franchise, allowing only male Anglican ratepayers a vote in parish elections. Elsewhere, groups or individual residents successfully pushed for a more inclusive franchise which allowed ratepaying women, Dissenters, and Jews a voice in parochial politics. Similarly mixed practices emerged with regard to electoral procedure: residents who feared the overbearing influence of their neighbours pressed for a secret ballot, while others insisted on the merits of an open poll. These cases illustrate the importance of small-scale local institutions as key sites of innovation in the history of electoral reform.

A Semi-Quantum Private Comparison Base on W-States.

Privacy comparison is an important research topic in secure multi-party computing, widely used in e-commerce, secret ballots, and other fields. However, the development of quantum computing power poses a growing potential security threat to secure multi-party algorithms based on mathematically tricky problems, and most of the proposed quantum privacy comparison schemes could be more efficient. Therefore, based on the W-state, we offer a more efficient semi-quantum privacy comparison method. The security analysis shows that the scheme can resist third-party, measurement, and entanglement attacks. Compared with the previous work, the scheme significantly improves communication efficiency and has stronger practicability.

Document Number Five: Elections and Tutelary Politics in Uganda, 1967–1971

Abstract In July 1970, Uganda’s President Milton Obote published—under his own name—a plan for a new system of single-party elections. ‘Document Number Five’, as it was called, offered a radical solution to a profound problem. Africa’s nationalist politicians had committed themselves to adult suffrage and the secret ballot as an affirmation of the existence of the nation. Yet they feared that an untutored public, encouraged by unscrupulous politicians, would make the wrong electoral choices. Obote’s complex electoral plan was designed to enforce a national approach to campaigning. Yet, more than that, Document Number Five itself was imagined as the focus for a public political discussion that would educate and enlighten the public and discipline political opportunists. Uganda’s English-language media—dominated by a relatively small group, whose educational privilege had brought them to positions of power—became the forum for this discussion. It was a constrained discussion, conducted in the shadow of intimidation, but it was neither predictable nor entirely scripted. Those who wrote and spoke had a wary eye on their personal safety and their careers, but they also had a sense of themselves as intellectuals, whose words mattered to themselves and to others. While the planned elections never took place—forestalled by Idi Amin’s coup—those who spoke and wrote about Document Number Five affirmed the sense of those involved that politics was fundamentally tutelary and that it was their right, and duty, to guide those who were less educated.

Predicting party switching through machine learning and open data

Parliament dynamics might seem erratic at times. Predicting future voting patterns could support policy design based on the simulation of voting scenarios. The availability of open data on legislative activities and machine learning tools might enable such prediction. In our paper, we provide evidence for this statement by developing an algorithm able to predict party switching in the Italian Parliament with over 70% accuracy up to two months in advance. The analysis was based on voting data from the XVII (2013-2018) and XVIII (2018-2022) Italian legislature. We found party switchers exhibited higher participation in secret ballots and showed a progressive decrease in coherence with their party's majority votes up to two months before the actual switch. These results show how machine learning combined with political open data can support predicting and understanding political dynamics.

Ballot Reform, the Personal Vote, and Political Representation in the United States

AbstractTheories of electoral accountability emphasize voters' ability to evaluate individual officeholders, which incentivises officials to demonstrate their quality. Before the Australian ballot was introduced in the US at the turn of the twentieth century, however, most ballot designs constrained voters' ability to distinguish individual candidates. Previous scholarship argues that ballot reform led to the rise of candidate-centred politics and the decline in party influence in the twentieth century. We reassess the evidence for this claim and implement the most comprehensive analysis to date on the secret ballot's effects on outcomes related to distributive politics, legislator effort, and party influence. Using an improved research design, we find scant evidence that ballot reform directly affected legislator behaviour, much less that it transformed political representation. While the Australian ballot may have been a necessary condition for the eventual rise of candidate-centred politics, ballot reform did not by itself reshape American politics.

Smart Voting System

The electoral system in India has undergone several changes in recent years. The current system involves either Secret Ballot Voting (SBV) or Electronic Voting Machines (EVM), both of which are costly, labor-intensive and inefficient. The current system only verifies identification proof, which increases the likelihood of fraudulent voting. This study proposes the use of an electronic voting system that incorporates fingerprint and face recognition technology. The online system enables voters to cast their votes from anywhere, minimizing the chances of voting fraud. The proposed system has three levels of security: verification of unique id number, election id number, and face recognition. The use of voter identity number and fingerprint can prevent fake and duplicate registrations, leading to a higher success rate during voting. This method significantly enhances the security level of the voting process. Key Words: identification proof, face recognition, protect, security level, success.

2022 Award for Best Article in NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics

For more than a decade, the American Name Society has singled out an outstanding article to be given the Best Article of the Year Award. To select the publication to receive this prestigious honor, each member of the Editorial Board independently reviewed all of the articles that had been published in 2022. As per ANS tradition, obituaries, notes, editorials, book reviews, and articles contributed by the Editor-in-Chief were excluded from consideration. To make their decision, Board Members were asked to select the publications which they felt possessed the highest degree of creativity; demonstrated the best writing style; employed the soundest research methodology; and had the greatest potential to make a lasting and significant contribution to onomastics. Then, in a secret ballot, the Board members cast their votes. This report details the results of that selection process and reveals the 2022 winner of the ANS Best Article of the Year award.

Suffrage of persons deprived of liberty: positions of the European Court of Human Rights and the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation

Recently, the importance of finding a clear and, most importantly, a stable balance between private and public interests has become increasingly important. Complex relations between countries, between judicial institutions, regional associations, state sovereignty, which has once again found itself in the place of globalization, are one of the few factors that force a different assessment of interstate interactions. The issue of the electoral rights of persons who are in places of deprivation of liberty in the domestic legislation of Russia and international law is regulated differently in the Russian Federation, persons who are serving time for criminal acts committed cannot use their active suffrage. This norm finds its formal consolidation in the Basic Law of Russia (Part 3 of Article 32). Protocol 1 to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in Article 3 does not formally reflect restrictions on subjects entitled to vote, defining only the requirement for States to hold free elections with reasonable frequency by secret ballot in conditions that ensure the free expression of the will of the people when choosing legislative authorities. It was this discrepancy that led to the issuance of a pilot resolution to Russia and the United Kingdom, which is in a similar position. The purpose of this article is to review the positions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation and the ECHR to assess objectivity in the fundamental issue of respect for human rights and the right of the state to its own opinion. And although on September 16, the Russian Federation completed the procedure for denouncing the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and, accordingly, the rulings of the European Court of Justice no longer apply to Russia, this analysis seems important how objective and impartial an international judicial body be to resolve internal issues of the State and is it capable of doing so? The result of the reflections led to the conclusion that there is a need for a conceptual revision of the relationship between national and interstate courts in general, especially taking into account the subsidiary nature of international justice and the instability of the legal positions of international judicial institutions.

A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac

A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac

Elections of rural akims: new electoral reform

The article describes the election system of rural akims in the Republic of Kazakhstan since 2021 and examines the technologies of pre-election campaigning from the point of view of electing village akims. During the elections of akims, the main attention is paid to the need to agitate the electoral system of akims. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the study of the main problems of campaigning activities of rural leaders in the electoral process.The authors argue that the direct elections of rural akims are a very important event, marking a completely new stage in the modernization of the local self-government system. The innovation of the bill is the introduction of elections of rural akims by secret ballot on the basis of universal, equal and immediate suffrage, as well as the introduction of the procedure for nominating candidates through political parties and self-nomination.Direct elections of rural akims provide an opportunity for citizens to actively exercise their constitutional rights, increase their understanding of the needs and problems of local executive bodies, and fully implement the concept of a «listening state».

Expert consensus on standardized process of imaging examination and diagnosis of gastric cancer (2022 edition)

Following with the development of individualized treatment of gastric cancer, the standardized radiological evaluation of gastric cancer is becoming more and more important. However,as a hollow viscera, the stomach is not fixed in shape and has a complex relationship with adjacent organs in the upper abdomen, which lead to the challenges in the radiological detection, localization, diagnosis and differential diagnosis, classification and staging, and evaluation of treatment response of gastric cancer. To deal with the challenges and address to clinical concerns, this consensus included the domestic experts on the frontline of clinical diagnosis and treatment of gastric cancer, and invited medical and surgical experts to participate in the inspection. The whole process was sorted out around five key points of gastric cancer radiological evaluation, including the selection of modalities, predisposal specification, examination standardization, reporting regulation and procedure in the participation of multidisciplinary team. All the experts voted by secret ballot to determine the level of evidence and recommendation. It is hoped that it can be used as a standard reference for radiological examination and diagnosis of gastric cancer.

Vote buying and redistribution

Vote buying is a form of political clientelism involving pre-electoral transfers of money or material benefits from candidates to voters. Despite the presence of secret ballots, vote buying remains a pervasive phenomenon during elections in developing countries. While prior literature has focused on how vote buying is enforced by parties and political candidates and which types of voters are most likely targeted, we know much less about the behavioral spillover effects of vote buying on citizens’ demand for redistribution and contributions to the provision of public goods. In this paper, we provide evidence on how vote buying causally affects voters’ candidate choice, support for redistribution, and public goods provision. Using data from a laboratory experiment in Kenya, we find that vote buying is a double-edged sword for candidates using clientelist strategies: it attracts votes from those who were offered money and accepted it, but it also leads to negative reactions from those who rejected the offer as well as those who were not offered money. In line with its effect on voting behavior, vote buying has negative effects on subjects’ evaluations of the vote-buying candidate. Vote buying significantly reduces individuals’ stated preferences for more government spending on police and law enforcement—yet, surprisingly, not on other welfare areas such as unemployment benefits or health. We also find that open ballots—but not vote-buying campaigns—reduce individuals’ willingness to contribute to public goods provisions.

Starbucks Accuses NLRB of Collusion with Union

Starbucks Accuses NLRB of Collusion with Union

Artificial intelligence and the secret ballot

In this paper, we argue that because of the advent of Artificial Intelligence, the secret ballot is now much less effective at protecting voters from voting related instances of social ostracism and social punishment. If one has access to vast amounts of data about specific electors, then it is possible, at least with respect to a significant subset of electors, to infer with high levels of accuracy how they voted in a past election. Since the accuracy levels of Artificial Intelligence are so high, the practical consequences of someone inferring one’s vote are identical to the practical consequences of having one’s vote revealed directly under an open voting regime. Therefore, if one thinks that the secret ballot is at least partly justified because it protects electors against voting related social ostracism and social punishment, one should be morally troubled by how Artificial Intelligence today can be used to infer individual electors’ past voting behaviour.