Traditional Voting Research Articles

СТАТИСТИЧНІ РОЗПОДІЛИ ТА ЛАНЦЮЖКОВЕ ПОДАННЯ ДАНИХ ПРИ ВИЗНАЧЕННІ РЕЛЕВАНТНОСТІ СТРУКТУРНИХ ОПИСІВ ВІЗУАЛЬНИХ ОБ’ЄКТІВ

Предметом досліджень статті є моделі для встановлення рівня релевантності зображень у просторі розподілів для дескрипторів ключових точок при розпізнаванні візуальних об’єктів у системах комп’ютерного зору. Метою є створення методу структурного розпізнавання зображень на підставі впровадження ланцюжкових моделей даних із використанням ймовірнісних розподілів множини дескрипторів. Завдання: розроблення математичних та програмних моделей для ефективного за швидкодією аналізу даних при визначенні релевантності структурних описів, вивчення властивостей, атрибутів застосування, значень параметрів цих моделей, оцінювання результативності за наслідками оброблення конкретних зображень. Застосовуваними методами є: детектор BRISK для формування дескрипторів ключових точок, апарат інтелектуального аналізу даних, методи побітового оброблення та побудови розподілів бітових даних, апарат метричного визначення релевантності, програмне моделювання. Отримані такі результати. Перехід від опису множин дескрипторів до ймовірнісних розподілів фрагментів і зіставлення образів у просторі розподілів забезпечують необхідну результативність розпізнавання. Оброблення та аналіз даних виконується у сотні разів швидше, ніж традиційний підрахунок голосів. Оброблення та аналіз сполучень бітів формує значимі властивості для сукупності елементів опису зі збереженням структури даних і їх уніфікації. Зі збільшенням числа бітів у фрагменті розподілу зростає відстань між зображеннями, що сприяє збільшенню ступеня їх розрізнення. Ланцюговим поданням та застосуванням розподілів створюється новий простір даних, що дає можливість суттєво покращити показники функціонування систем розпізнавання зображень. Висновки. Наукова новизна дослідження полягає в удосконаленні методу структурного розпізнавання зображень на основі впровадження узагальненої ланцюгової структури опису із використанням значень розподілу для фрагментів множини дескрипторів ключових точок, що змістовно відображають властивості зображень об’єктів і забезпечують результативне розпізнавання. Практична значущість – досягнення суттєвого рівня підвищення швидкодії обчислення релевантності, підтвердження результативності запропонованих модифікацій на прикладах зображень, отримання прикладних програмних моделей для дослідження та впровадження методів класифікації в системах комп’ютерного зору.

An Implementation of Online Voting System using Okamoto-Uchiyama Encryption Scheme

Electronic voting (e-Voting) has totally replaced the traditional voting system. Due to the rapid growth of computer networks and cloud computing the existing e-Voting system can be replaced with online voting system.When data is on cloud,the major challenge in voting system is confidentiality, security and accuracy. The advances in cryptography can be used to a face these challenges. The presented work implements Okamoto-Uchiyama algorithm with its additive homomorphic property. This work focuses on serving voting system on large scale of voters. We have made our system more user friendly and faster but secured than existing systems.

Property Taxes for Agriculture: Use-Value Assessment and Urbanization Across the United States

We analyze the spread of use-value assessment (UVA) programs applied to agricultural and rural land for property tax purposes across the 50 states. Taxing such land on the basis of its current use in agriculture rather than its full market value can confer significant property tax reductions on owners of the land. Effects are often substantial for land near large urban areas. Using a time-to-event model, we find, as others have posited, that a driving force behind the spread of UVA has been the secular trend toward urbanization across all 50 states. We also find that models of collective action do a good job of explaining the spread of UVA. Urbanization and divergence of the values of agricultural and nonagricultural land are critical to the spread of UVA. However, other important factors include changes in average farm size and changes in agriculture's share of state income. We find that in states where average farm sizes increased more rapidly, legislatures were quicker to adopt UVA. That finding is consistent with an increased concentration of agricultural interests. We also find that states where agriculture's share of state income declined more rapidly also were quicker to adopt UVA. That finding, too, is consistent with models of collective action. As groups become smaller, the burden of subsidizing them also falls. Note that although the findings are consistent with models of interest group behavior, they are at odds with traditional voting models.

E-voting scheme using secret sharing and K-anonymity

E-voting maybe replaces the traditional voting scheme in the future, however, the security threat must be paid enough attention. In this paper, a novel e-voting scheme is proposed using secret sharing and k-anonymity, which not only satisfies the basic security goals such as the non-cheating, the universal verifiability, the confidentiality, and the anonymity, but also achieves the addition properties including coercion-resistance and unconditional security since the security of the proposed scheme does not rely on any computational hard problem.

Anonymous and formally verified dual signature based online e-voting protocol

The traditional paper-based voting is severely criticized after having found evidence of rigging in elections, leading to the uncertainty in the fairness of the election process. Traditional voting systems have severe issues in either user’s privacy or voting procedures. To counter these issues, e-voting systems have emerged as a potential solution. In this work, we proposed Internet e-voting protocol that fulfills the core properties like anonymity, verifiability, eligibility, privacy, receipt-freeness and fairness using dual signature. We prove the effectiveness and validity of our system using formal methods. A rigorous performance evaluation shows that our system clearly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art blind signature Internet e-voting protocols.

HASHING OF STRUCTURAL DESCRIPTIONS AT BUILDING OF THE CLASS IMAGE DESCRIPTOR, COMPUTING OF RELEVANCE AND CLASSIFICATION OF THE VISUAL OBJECTS

The problem of classification of visual objects on the space of the descriptor features of the image key points is solved with application of data hashing to the image description. The efficiency of application of options of the hashing functions is analyzed at building of the class descriptor as a generalized image of the etalon and at determining the level of relevance for the binary descriptions. Experimental estimation of the time for computing the hash-functions and determining the relevance for the hashed images as compared to the traditional voting approach is performed by means of the program simulation. The efficiency of application of hash-processing of data is confirmed in terms of a substantial increase of the performance parameter.

Online ensemble learning with abstaining classifiers for drifting and noisy data streams

Mining data streams is among most vital contemporary topics in machine learning. Such scenario requires adaptive algorithms that are able to process constantly arriving instances, adapt to potential changes in data, use limited computational resources, as well as be robust to any atypical events that may appear. Ensemble learning has proven itself to be an effective solution, as combining learners leads to an improved predictive power, more flexible drift handling, as well as ease of being implemented in high-performance computing environments. In this paper, we propose an enhancement of popular online ensembles by augmenting them with abstaining option. Instead of relying on a traditional voting, classifiers are allowed to abstain from contributing to the final decision. Their confidence level is being monitored for each incoming instance and only learners that exceed certain threshold are selected. We introduce a dynamic and self-adapting threshold that is able to adapt to changes in the data stream, by monitoring outputs of the ensemble and allowing to exploit underlying diversity in order to efficiently anticipate drifts. Additionally, we show that forcing uncertain classifiers to abstain from making a prediction is especially useful for noisy data streams. Our proposal is a lightweight enhancement that can be applied to any online ensemble method, improving its robustness to drifts and noise. Thorough experimental analysis validated through statistical tests proves the usefulness of the proposed approach.

Effects of Social Presence and Social Capital on User Loyalty to the Social Networking Website

Electronic government initiatives play a central role in opening doors for potential voters to participate in the political process by using electronic voting systems. Electronic voting is attracting more attention by governments around the world, where many countries have exploited e-voting systems as an alternative to traditional voting in their national elections. Citizens differ in their attitude towards using e-voting. This study extended the technology acceptance model to predict the intentions to use e-voting. This paper explored the intentions of citizens to use e-voting systems by conducting an empirical research. To accomplish the main objectives of this paper, 320 surveys were collected from Jordanian citizens. The findings indicate a significant influence of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use and security. Trust failed to predict intentions to use e-voting systems.

Issues & Vulnerabilities Related to Online Voting and Its Mitigation

Majority share of the traditional voting systems have been utilized throughout the years in races. Each of these strategies had orderly inadequacies. The current customary voting frameworks have been subjected to gross manhandle and abnormalities. Electronic voting which is rising as a contrasting option to these traditional voting frameworks, however exceedingly encouraging is not free of blemishes; remote web voting frameworks still experience the ill effects of numerous security issues which depend on the customers, the servers, and the system associations. Denial of service attack and Sybil attack still have a place with the most difficult security issues. In this paper we talk about the security issues related with remote web voting. Moreover we examine how Sybil assault can be utilized as a part of character and certifications burglary. Specifically, we look at the plausibility of running national races over the Internet. The concentrate of this paper is on the impediments of the current conveyed framework as far as the security of the hosts and the Internet itself. We infer that without fitting safety efforts, web based races can be a test.

A Voting-Based Distributed Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Strategy for Connected Vehicles

In this paper, we propose a novel distributed cooperative sensing algorithm for connected vehicles. The adaptive energy detection threshold, which is used to decide whether the channel is busy, is optimized in this paper by using a computationally efficient numerical approach. The proposed optimization approach minimizes the probability of an incorrect detection as a function of both the probability of false alarm and the probability of missed detection. By considering both probabilities when computing the probability of incorrect detection, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the proposed approach is novel. During the energy detection process, large-scale fading, multipath fading, Doppler effect, and transmission errors affecting the control messaging process are accounted for in order to provide a practical solution for connected vehicles. Once the available channels have been detected, the vehicles share this information using broadcast control messages. Each vehicle evaluates the available channels by voting on the information received from one-hop neighbors, where the credibility of each neighbor is weighted during the voting process. An interdisciplinary approach referred to as entropy-based weighting is used to define the neighbor, as well as the vehicle's own credibility. The voting mechanism is switched between the proposed voting mechanism and the traditional voting approach obtained from the current state of the art in order to maintain a balance between the computational cost/latency and robust spectrum sensing. Experimental results show that by using the proposed distributed cooperative spectrum sensing mechanism, spectrum detection error converges to zero.

Similar offspring voting genetic algorithm for spectral variable selection

This paper proposes a novel spectral variable selection approach named similar offspring voting genetic algorithm (sovGA). Unlike the traditional voting method (here called voting genetic algorithm) that attempts to overcome the stochastic risk of a genetic algorithm but may damage its optimal variable combination, sovGA aims to achieve a trade‐off between prediction precision and reliability of models. Genetic algorithm was repeated many times, and some effective similar offspring were obtained by a proposed algorithm; then, the spectral variables were selected by a voting mechanism. Two calibration methods, partial least square regression and multiple linear regression, were constructed to evaluate performance. The experimental results show that sovGA outperformed genetic algorithm, voting genetic algorithm, and the full spectrum situation in most cases.

A solution to the single-question crowd wisdom problem

Once considered provocative, the notion that the wisdom of the crowd is superior to any individual has become itself a piece of crowd wisdom, leading to speculation that online voting may soon put credentialed experts out of business. Recent applications include political and economic forecasting, evaluating nuclear safety, public policy, the quality of chemical probes, and possible responses to a restless volcano. Algorithms for extracting wisdom from the crowd are typically based on a democratic voting procedure. They are simple to apply and preserve the independence of personal judgment. However, democratic methods have serious limitations. They are biased for shallow, lowest common denominator information, at the expense of novel or specialized knowledge that is not widely shared. Adjustments based on measuring confidence do not solve this problem reliably. Here we propose the following alternative to a democratic vote: select the answer that is more popular than people predict. We show that this principle yields the best answer under reasonable assumptions about voter behaviour, while the standard 'most popular' or 'most confident' principles fail under exactly those same assumptions. Like traditional voting, the principle accepts unique problems, such as panel decisions about scientific or artistic merit, and legal or historical disputes. The potential application domain is thus broader than that covered by machine learning and psychometric methods, which require data across multiple questions.

Electronic voting systems for defending free will and resisting bribery and coercion based on ring anonymous signcryption scheme

Vote by ballot is the feature in a democratic society and the process of decision-making, tending to achieve the philosophy of democratic politics by having the public who are eligible to vote for competent candidates or leaders. With the rapid development of technologies and network applications, electronization has been actively promoted globally during the social transformation period that the concept of electronic voting is further derived. The major advantages of electronic voting, comparing with traditional voting, lie in the mobility strength of electronic voting, reducing a large amount of election costs and enhancing the convenience for the public. Electronic voting allows voters completing voting on the Internet that not only are climate and location restrictions overcome, but the voter turnout is also increased and the voting time is reduced for the public. With the development in the past three decades, electronic voting presents outstanding performance theoretically and practically. Nevertheless, it is regrettable that electronic voting schemes still cannot be completely open because of lures by money and threats. People to lure by money and threats would confirm the voters following their instructions through various methods that more factors would appear on election results, affecting the quality and fairness of the election. In this study, this project aims to design an electronic voting scheme which could actually defend voters’ free will so that lure of money and threats would fail. Furthermore, an electronic voting system based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography is proposed to ensure the efficiency and security, and Ring Signature and Signcryption are applied to reducing the computing costs. Moreover, this project also focuses on applying voting system to mobile devices. As the system efficiency and security are emphasized, voters do not need to participate in the election, but simply complete voting with smart phones, iPads, and computers. The votes would be automatically calculated and verified the results that the ballots are not necessarily printed, the printing of election mails is reduced, and manual handling is canceled. Such a method would effectively reduce voting costs and enhance the economic efficiency.

Reinterpreting Split-Ticket Voting in South Korea’s 2004 Legislative Election

What explains ticket-splitting in South Korea’s 2004 National Assembly election? While the mixed member systems literature generally focuses on strategic rationales to split ticketing, the role of contextual factors—in this case the impeachment of President Roh Moo-Hyun—remains largely unexplored. An analysis of Korea’s first two-vote mixed system election from 2004 finds that, besides traditional strategic voting, approval of Roh’s impeachment influenced strategic voting, but only among supporters of Roh’s own party, the Uri Party.

Receipt-freeness and coercion resistance in remote E-voting systems

Remote electronic voting (E-voting) is a more convenient and efficient methodology when compared with traditional voting systems. It allows voters to vote for candidates remotely, however, remote E-voting systems have not yet been widely deployed in practical elections due to several potential security issues, such as vote-privacy, robustness and verifiability. Attackers' targets can be either voting machines or voters. In this paper, we mainly focus on three important security properties related to voters: receipt-freeness, vote-selling resistance, and voter-coercion resistance. In such scenarios, voters are willing or forced to cooperate with attackers. We provide a survey of existing remote E-voting systems, to see whether or not they are able to satisfy these three properties to avoid corresponding attacks. Furthermore, we identify and summarise what mechanisms they use in order to satisfy these three security properties.

Receipt-freeness and coercion resistance in remote E-voting systems

Remote electronic voting (E-voting) is a more convenient and efficient methodology when compared with traditional voting systems. It allows voters to vote for candidates remotely, however, remote E-voting systems have not yet been widely deployed in practical elections due to several potential security issues, such as vote-privacy, robustness and verifiability. Attackers' targets can be either voting machines or voters. In this paper, we mainly focus on three important security properties related to voters: receipt-freeness, vote-selling resistance, and voter-coercion resistance. In such scenarios, voters are willing or forced to cooperate with attackers. We provide a survey of existing remote E-voting systems, to see whether or not they are able to satisfy these three properties to avoid corresponding attacks. Furthermore, we identify and summarise what mechanisms they use in order to satisfy these three security properties.

Multi-attribute decision making based on a novel IF point operator

Intuitionistic fuzzy (IF) point operators transform an intuitionistic fuzzy set to a fuzzy set, or an intuitionistic fuzzy set with a smaller degree of hesitance. The purpose of which is to empower the operations of intuitionistic fuzzy sets with traditional fuzzy set methodologies. In the present paper, a new IF point operator is proposed. Different from the existing IF point operators, the new approach includes two parametric functions with respect to the number of iterations. It is proved that the newly proposed method could be degenerated to the traditional IF point operators. Meanwhile, the new IF point operator can extend our horizons in the exploration of the relationship between fuzzy sets and intuitionistic fuzzy sets. Specifically, a special case of the new IF point operator would be entitled as the memoryless multi-stage voting method, with which the decision makers are assumed to be affected only by the outcomes of the latest round of voting. It is proved that the memoryless multi-stage voting method converges to the limit produced by the infinite number of iterations much faster than the traditional voting method. Furthermore, a numerical example is employed to demonstrate the validity and performance of the memoryless multi-stage voting approach.

Vanishing point detection using random forest and patch‐wise weighted soft voting

Variations in road types and its ambient environment make the single image based vanishing point detection a challenging task. In this study, a novel and efficient vanishing point detection method is proposed by using random forest and patch-wise weighted soft voting. To eliminate the noise votes introduced by background region and to reduce the workload of voting stage, random forest based valid patch extraction technique is developed, which distinguishes the informative road patches from the background noise. To prepare training data for the random forest, a training patch generation method is proposed, and a variety of road relevant features are introduced for training patch representation. Since the traditional pixel-wise voting scheme is time consuming and imprecise, a patch-wise weighted soft voting scheme is proposed to generate a more precise voting map and to further reduce the computational complexity of voting stage. The experimental results on the benchmark dataset show that the proposed method reveals a step forward in performance. The authors’ approach is about 6 times faster in detection speed and 5.6% better in detection accuracy than the generalised Laplacian of Gaussian filter based method, which is a well-known state-of-the-art approach.

E-voting adoption in a developing country

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present factors that affect e-voting adoption in the Middle East and, in particular, Jordan. Changing the election voting method for the people in Jordan from traditional voting to interactive voting via the web needs exploration to understand the factors affecting e-voting adoption by citizens. Therefore, this paper reports on a study undertaken to identify the main factors that would influence citizens’ intentions to adopt the use of an e-voting system in Jordan, using an established e-government adoption model and a theoretical framework consisting of the diffusion of innovations (DOI) theory and the technology acceptance model (TAM). Design/methodology/approach A survey study of 267 Jordanian citizens who were internet users investigated the influence of the aforementioned factors on the adoption and use of e-voting websites. Multiple regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses. Findings Contrary to the previous established e-government adoption model, beliefs and website design were not found to be significant predictors of the intention to use e-voting websites. The paper found that trust in government, attitudes, perceived usefulness and complexity were significant factors in Jordanian citizens’ intentions to use e-voting websites. Originality/value This is one of few studies to have used an established e-government adoption model to test the adoption of e-voting as one of the e-government applications. In addition, this paper is one of the few to examine the factors that influence the adoption and use of e-voting systems by citizens in the Middle East. Although the previous e-government adoption model showed the impact of attitude to be non-significant on e-government adoption, this paper shows the significant influence of attitudes on citizens’ intentions to use e-voting websites. On the other hand, this paper supports previous e-government adoption studies in showing the importance of including constructs of the DOI theory (relative advantage and complexity) and those related to TAM (perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use) when considering the topic of e-government adoption in a Middle Eastern country, although previous studies have shown similarities between these constructs.

A Survey on Crypt- Algorithms in Voting System

Objectives: Traditional voting process held at polling booths have been changed by merging technologies. Though voting system changed, the security provided was unfit to use it in real time. Thus this paper shows the result analysis of various crypt-algorithms to provide more security for voting process. Methods/Statistical Analysis: File Size, Upload & Download time, Efficiency, Memory usage, Speed, Throughput of various Crypt-Algorithm such as AES, RSA, ECC, Visual Cryptography, Blowfish were considered, compared and analyzed. So, we can obtain a better Crypt-Algorithm for Voting. Findings: A suitable Crypt-Algorithm for security which can give good performance in parameters like throughput, Average speed, etc.., was obtained in this survey. Application/ Improvement: Local Election, Data Transferred over network will be secure for various applications, useful for e-commerce software, used to secure passwords.