Traditional Election Research Articles

Traditional election campaigns must now go digital!

Traditional election campaigns must now go digital!

SoulBound E-Voting System

Abstract: The right to vote is a fundamental right of citizens of democratic countries around the world. This is necessary so that citizens have a say in the choice of who represents them or in matters affecting them. The aspects of security and transparency are still threats from widespread elections with traditional systems. For years, democracies around the world have moved from sticking to paper ballots to electronic voting machines. These machines are not tamper-proof despite system checks, security procedures and election protocols. However, hacking and tampering with these machines is becoming more frequent as the number and methods of attackers increase. Physical access to the EVM, even for a few minutes, is enough to crack it. To ensure a fair and reliable election process, safety and security must be ensured throughout the process. A single organization still exists to administer the centralized system used for general elections. When organizations have complete control over their databases and systems, they can disrupt the database of important opportunities, which can cause a lot of problems in traditional election systems. Because networked software devices are vulnerable, the proposed work applies security concepts based on popular blockchain technology. It is currently being implemented with the goal of securing online money transactions in the digital economy. Blockchain has paved the way for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. A blockchain is a distributed and non-translatable ledger in which data is added and updated in real time based on the consensus of nodes running software on the network. However, once data is added to the registry, you cannot delete or edit the data from the database. Therefore, counterfeit voting is impossible, increasing the reliability of the electronic voting system. As a result, governments around the world are exploring blockchain as a means to make general elections tamper-proof and transparent, with the goal of enabling a system where everyone trusts data and is tamper-proof. Using blockchain for database distribution of electronic voting systems can reduce one of the sources of fraud in database manipulation.

The Impact of Incidental Environmental Factors on Vote Choice: Wind Speed is Related to More Prevention-Focused Voting

How might irrelevant events infiltrate voting decisions? The current research introduces a new mechanism—regulatory focus—by which incidental environmental factors can affect vote choice. Regulatory focus theory proposes that there are two fundamental psychological orientations in how people navigate their worlds: A prevention focus tunes cognition towards security, safety, protection, and risk aversion, whereas a promotion focus orients attention toward achieving growth and positive outcomes. We present a model for how wind speed on Election Day affects voting by shifting the regulatory focus of voters. We propose that increased wind speed shifts voters toward selecting prevention-focused options (e.g., restricting immigration, rejecting Brexit, rejecting Scottish Independence) over promotion-focused options (e.g., promoting immigration, favoring Brexit, favoring Scottish Independence). We further argue that wind speed only affects voting when an election clearly offers a choice between prevention and promotion-focused options. Using a mixed-method approach—archival analyses of the “Brexit” vote, the Scotland independence referendum, and 10 years of Swiss referendums, as well as one field study and one experiment—we find that individuals exposed to higher wind speeds become more prevention-focused and more likely to support prevention-focused electoral options. The findings highlight the political importance of incidental environmental factors. Practically, they speak to the benefit of absentee voting and expanding voting periods beyond traditional election days.

A Novel Multi-Objective Hybrid Election Algorithm for Higher-Order Random Satisfiability in Discrete Hopfield Neural Network

Hybridized algorithms are commonly employed to improve the performance of any existing method. However, an optimal learning algorithm composed of evolutionary and swarm intelligence can radically improve the quality of the final neuron states and has not received creative attention yet. Considering this issue, this paper presents a novel metaheuristics algorithm combined with several objectives—introduced as the Hybrid Election Algorithm (HEA)—with great results in solving optimization and combinatorial problems over a binary search space. The core and underpinning ideas of this proposed HEA are inspired by socio-political phenomena, consisting of creative and powerful mechanisms to achieve the optimal result. A non-systematic logical structure can find a better phenomenon in the study of logic programming. In this regard, a non-systematic structure known as Random k Satisfiability (RANkSAT) with higher-order is hosted here to overcome the interpretability and dissimilarity compared to a systematic, logical structure in a Discrete Hopfield Neural Network (DHNN). The novelty of this study is to introduce a new multi-objective Hybrid Election Algorithm that achieves the highest fitness value and can boost the storage capacity of DHNN along with a diversified logical structure embedded with RANkSAT representation. To attain such goals, the proposed algorithm tested four different types of algorithms, such as evolutionary types (Genetic Algorithm (GA)), swarm intelligence types (Artificial Bee Colony algorithm), population-based (traditional Election Algorithm (EA)) and the Exhaustive Search (ES) model. To check the performance of the proposed HEA model, several performance metrics, such as training–testing, energy, similarity analysis and statistical analysis, such as the Friedman test with convergence analysis, have been examined and analyzed. Based on the experimental and statistical results, the proposed HEA model outperformed all the mentioned four models in this research.

Towards Achieving Personal Privacy Protection and Data Security on Integrated E-Voting Model of Blockchain and Message Queue

The growing number of e-voting applications indicates the need in resolving issues that exist in the traditional election model. By integrating with blockchain technology, we could extend the model’s capabilities by presenting transparency in logic execution and integrity in data storage. Despite these advantages, blockchain brings in new challenges regarding system performance and data privacy. Due to distributed nature of blockchain, any new updating request needs to be reflected in all network’s peers before proceeding to the subsequence requests. This process produces delay and possibility in request rejection due to update conflict. In addition, data removal is no longer feasible since each record is protected by immutable hashed link. To overcome these limitations, the integration model of blockchain and message queue is proposed in this paper. The design addresses security concerns in data exchanging patterns, voter anonymization, and proof of system actor’s legitimacy. Performance tests are conducted on system prototypes which were deployed on two different settings. The result shows that the system can perform well in production environment, and introduction of message queue handling scheme can cope with blockchain’s errors in unexpected scenarios.

Can We Forecast Presidential Election Using Twitter Data? An Integrative Modelling Approach

ABSTRACT Forecasting political elections has attracted a lot of attention. Traditional election forecasting models in political science generally take preference in poll surveys and economic growth at the national level as the predictive factors. However, spatially or temporally dense polling has always been expensive. In the recent decades, the exponential growth of social media has drawn enormous research interests from various disciplines. Existing studies suggest that social media data have the potential to reflect the political landscape. Particularly, Twitter data have been extensively used for sentiment analysis to predict election outcomes around the world. However, previous studies have typically been data-driven and the reasoning process was oversimplified without robust theoretical foundations. Most of the studies correlate twitter sentiment directly and solely with the election results which can hardly be regarded as predictions. To develop a more theoretically plausible approach this study draws on political science prediction models and modifies them in two aspects. First, our approach uses Twitter sentiment to replace polling data. Second, we transform traditional political science models from the national level to the county level, the finest spatial level of voting counts. The proposed model has independent variables of support rate based on Twitter sentiment and variables related to economic growth. The dependent variable is the actual voting result. The 2016 U.S. presidential election data in Georgia is used to train the model. Results show that the proposed modely is effective with the accuracy of 81% and the support rate based on Twitter sentiment ranks the second most important feature.

A Method to Improve Transparency of Electronic Election Process without Identification

Abstract Transparency of bank accounts, nowadays, is an undeniable necessity, but no one denies that definite transparency throughout election process is not realized thus far in the world. This calls for fundamental changes in traditional electronic election methods. The new method must close the way for any complaints by the candidate as to the voting process as the public completely trusts in the voting mechanism. Synchronizing voting and votes counting improves the public's trust in the results of election. The proposed secure room-corridor of electronic voting employs election watchers and reports real time results of election along with observance of confidentiality of the votes.

Tweeting Negative

The use of negative ads in traditional election campaigns has been well-documented, but the authors know little about the use of Twitter to “go negative.” They content analyze candidate tweets from four different gubernatorial elections in 2011 to understand how candidates are using Twitter. They coded 849 tweets to explain the determinants of “going negative” on Twitter. The results show that while tweets are overwhelmingly positive, candidates go negative by tweeting about policy. They believe this supports the innovation hypothesis, with Twitter being a more conducive forum for policy-based messages. Other determinants of negative campaigning such as competitiveness of the race and campaign funding were consistent with the normalization hypothesis.

PRP: A primary replacement protocol based on early discovery of battery power failure in MANETs

In cooperative Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), copies of data are replicated on different mobile devices to improve system's availability. A primary or authoritative control node is assigned to act as a coordinator for the shared data copies, when this primary fails, another node has to be elected to replace the failed one. Since mobile devices have a limited battery power, the primary may fail at any time. Moreover, current primary election protocols in MANETs employ a notable wireless communication overhead which consumes a considerable amount of battery power. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol, called Primary Replacement Protocol (PRP), to replace an exhausted primary in MANETs based on the measurement of its remaining battery power early before it dies. More specifically, PRP replaces the exhausted primary with a healthy node when its remaining battery power reaches a predefined threshold. This replacement can be accomplished with much less communication overhead. Hence, our approach has two contributions: 1) reducing the chance of primary outage by early detection of potential power failure, 2) saving the power that is consumed in traditional primary election approaches due to communication overhead.

Using Online Search Traffic to Predict US Presidential Elections

Predictions of the United States presidential election vote outcome have been growing in scope and popularity in the academic realm. Traditional election forecasting models predict the United States presidential popular vote outcome on a national level based primarily on economic indicators (e.g., real income growth, unemployment), public approval ratings, and incumbency advantage. Many of these forecasting models are rooted in retrospective voting theory (Downs 1957; Fiorina 1981), essentially rewarding the party in office if times are good, punishing it if times are bad. These models have successfully predicted election results by modeling economic performance and incumbent approval ratings (Campbell 2012; Fair 1992; Fair 1996; Klarner 2012). For example, Abramowitz's (2004; 2005) “time for a change model” predicts election results using economic performance during the first half of the election year, the number of years the incumbent party has been in office, and presidential approval. For a full review of 13 presidential forecasts for the US 2012 election, seePS: Political Science and PoliticsOctober 2012 (45 (4): 610–75). Although national models are the most common, researchers have also started to use state-level predictions for presidential and congressional outcomes, with mostly positive success (Berry and Bickers 2012; Jerome and Jerome-Speziari 2012; Klarner 2012; Silver 2012). These models use similar predictors, such as incumbency, economic conditions, and home-state advantage, and predict the per-candidate percentage of popular vote. Unfortunately, with state-level models, many of the economic variables used in predicting national models are unavailable beyond 10–15 election cycles (compounded also by 1959 additions of Alaska and Hawaii), so state-level models naturally have a shorter period of analysis than do national models.

Implementation of e-Voting system using new blinding signature protocol

Electronic voting has attracted much interest recently and a variety of schemes have been proposed. Generally speaking, all these schemes can be divided into three main approaches: based on blind signature, based on mix networks and based on homomorphism encryption. Schemes based on blind signature are thought to be simple, efficient, and suitable for large scale elections. With the help of networking and internet we can easily replace the traditional election process with the electronic voting system. In the proposed cryptographic technique we are implementing new blind signature based on linear matrix function and modulation. The new scheme fully conforms to the requirement of large scale election such as privacy, fairness and security. The voter's private key for digital signature is protected by using linear square matrix based on block cipher algorithm and it can be make many combination so that only valid voter can use it. In the cryptography history, block cipher used in symmetric key algorithm, this is first time we are introducing block cipher as a public key algorithm.

Negotiating the Political Self on Social Media Platforms An In-Depth Study of Image-Management in an Election-Campaign in a Multi-Party Democracy

The elections 2010 were the first in Sweden where social media platforms were used to a large extent by politicians and parties in their campaigns. In this paper we follow the liberal parliamentarian Nina Larsson, who in tandem with traditional election campaigning used social media platforms with the guidance of a local communication agency, Hello Clarice. The paper is theoretically grounded in an understanding of our time as late modern, of social media use as expressive and web campaigning as to large extent revolving around image-management. The research question that will be attended to in this paper is how Nina Larsson used social media platforms in her campaign negotiate the image of herself. The methods used for empirical data-gathering are inspired by (n)ethnography, with both participant observation online and offline, interviews as well as content analyses of Nina's social media postings. Results indicate that she used social media platforms to control her political image, to amplify selected text - texts that often originated in offline/broadcast media – and to negotiate a position within the Liberal Party rather than to deliberate with potential voters.

Material Election and Ecological Design for Furniture Products Based on the Principles of Green Manufacturing

Based on the principles of green manufacturing, the ecological system of furniture design consists of the ecological furniture design analysis, implementation, evaluation, as well as supporting and maintenance. Compared to the traditional furniture material election, the material election subject to the green manufacturing presents a new philosophy. The principle of furniture material election subject to the green manufacturing involves the combination of technical principle, economical principle and environmental principle. This article also discusses the minimization of life-cycle cost of furniture material election subject to green manufacturing.

A JOURNEY THROUGH 10 COUNTRIES

The African Elections Project (www.africanelections.org) was established with the vision of enhancing the ability of journalists, citizen journalists and the news media to provide more timely and relevant election information and knowledge, while undertaking monitoring of specific and important aspects of elections using social media tools and ICT applications. Elections are the cornerstone of democracy and the media have a key role to play in deepening democracy by providing impartial coverage of elections. In addition to traditional election coverage, online election reporting on the Africa continent has been experiencing growth in recent years. It takes the form of special election websites that incorporate elements of citizen journalism or crowdsourcing and is mostly driven by mobile phones. It is mashed up with blogs, interactive maps and social media tools such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook among others. This article chronicles the African Elections Project's field experiences based on the elections it has covered in 10 countries: Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, Mauritania, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Botswana, Togo and Niger, showing the similarities and importance of online election coverage in these countries. The Internet is gradually providing new sets of tools for journalists which could be relevant and applicable for reporting elections. The paper concludes by showing the difficulties journalists encounter in the practice of reporting elections and offers suggestions for future research.

Normalization 2.0: A longitudinal analysis of German online campaigns in the national elections 2002–9

This article examines the functional, relational and discursive dimensions of the normalization thesis in one study, for both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 features, in a longitudinal design. It is based on a quantitative content and structural analysis of German party websites in the national elections between 2002 and 2009. The results show that the normalization thesis holds true in all its dimensions over time and in the Web 2.0 era: parties still focus on the top-down elements of information provision and delivery while interactive options are scarce. The digital divide between parliamentary and non-parliamentary parties has narrowed over time, but remains visible for all online functions in 2009. Moreover, the gap is wider in Web 2.0 than in Web 1.0. Finally, German e-campaigns increasingly reflect those patterns of traditional election coverage that have been held accountable for rising political alienation among the public, i.e. strategic news and extensive negativism.

Adding Up the Costs and Benefits of Voting by Mail

Adding Up the Costs and Benefits of Voting by Mail

Supernode Election Algorithm in P2P Network Based upon District Partition

With the rapid development of P2P, there are some new applications such as P2PSIP and intercommunication of heterogeneous DHTs (Distributed Hash Tables). In those scenarios, there need some nodes acting as proxies and gateways. Such nodes as proxies or gateways in P2P overlays were called Supernodes (SNs). The problem of which nodes could be the SNs was called SN election. In an overlay that had n nodes, the message complexity of traditional election algorithms was ) ( 2 n O , it was the horrible overhead in a huge overlay. In this paper, a new SN election algorithm based upon district partition which divided the whole overlay into k small districts and using distributed and parallel computing in these small units was brought forward. This algorithm would decrease the message complexity to ) ( 2 k n O and increase the electing speed. At the same time, the elected SN would be evenly distributed in the whole overlay.

Election Media and Youth Political Engagement

Election campaigns are regular opportunities for heightened political engagement and socialization. For many young people, politics becomes most visible and concrete during electoral contests. However, campaign media, at least in the United States, typically have not targeted young voters with messages that enhance their participation and turnout. In fact, much traditional election media coverage of youth has emphasized their lack of interest and involvement, and thus works to discourage the development of activist political orientations. With the evolution of new types of dynamic and populist media formats, such as blogs and social/political networking websites, young people have greater opportunities to establish a presence in election campaigns on their own terms. This piece will explore how new developments in campaign media are changing the relationship of young people to the electoral process.

A Light-Weight e-Voting System with Distributed Trust

A new agent-based scheme for secure electronic voting is proposed in the paper. The scheme is universal and can be realized in a network of stationary and mobile electronic devices. The proposed mechanism supports the implementation of a user interface simulating traditional election cards, semi-mechanical voting devices or utilization purely electronic voting booths. The security mechanisms applied in the system are based on verified cryptographic primitives: the secure secret sharing scheme and Merkle's puzzles. Due to pre-computations during the generation of agent, the voter need not to do computations. The proposed distributed trust architecture makes the crucial stage of sending votes elastic, reliable, and effective.

An anonymous voting mechanism based on the key exchange protocol

In democratic society, elections and voting are always the most important hallmarks. However, there are plenty of problems in the traditional election such as inconvenience, unfairness, non-mobility, non-anonymity, and so forth. What is more, the cost of the traditional election often places a heavy burden on the nation. To solve the problems of the traditional election, the concept of “electronic voting” is introduced, where people are allowed to vote over the Internet and the government can save lots of money. The properties of mobility and convenience are the most significant reasons why people may adopt the electronic voting mechanism in the future. Although technologies for electronic voting have been developed for about 20 years, some problems, such as uncoercibility and completeness, still cannot be overcome. In this article, we are going to present an efficient and secure voting mechanism by employing Chaum's blind signature scheme and Diffie–Hellman key exchange protocol. Our proposed electronic voting mechanism not only achieves lots of essential requirements of general electronic voting schemes but also possesses better efficiency such that it can be the practical one.