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The goal of the election is not only to determine the outcomes but also to lend credence to the winners, even for those voters who did not bother voting for them. This underlines the necessity of holding free, fair, and hidden elections. Component of all this is that elections are controlled by open and accountable, neutral, and autonomous electoral-management bodies. Utilizing technology in voting procedures can make it quicker, more efficient, and less susceptible to security breaches. The technology can ensure the safety of every vote, better and faster and much more accurate counting and automatic tallying. The design of a sophisticated voting system is a complex task as it has to fulfill several essential criteria. The secrecy of an elector's poll is to be well-preserved. The voting system should not give any evidence that proves which candidate receives a particular voter's vote. The process uses minimum paper documents and is therefore environmentally friendly. Bio-metric or retina scans can be used to ensure security. The e-voting system is vulnerable to several serious attacks from external sources. There is indeed a likelihood that anybody who has immediate access to the e-voting system can access it suspiciously. Malevolent software can steal one candidate's votes and assign them to some other. An attacker may deny officials access to the e-voting arrangement or render an e-voting structure unavailable for the Election Day voting process. This is known as a service denial (DoS) attack. But this kind of threat is hard to detect. A large number of questionable and invalid votes are the big problem with traditional paper-ballot based voting system. This phenomenon will be eliminated if the e-voting system is used. In addition to the speed of counting and reduction of errors the e-voting system offers some more advantages such as accessibility, verifiability, and availability. When the e-voting system is integrated with the Internet, any eligible voter can vote from anywhere as there will be two or more ...

Dear colleagues, Welcome to the "Journal of Policy & Governance"! In my opinion, an editorial may reflect the general direction of the journal, values, strategy, priorities, goals and objectives, and so on. This is the first edition of the Journal of Policy & Governance where I act as the Editor-in-Chief. The title of the journal includes two key concepts, the "Policy" and the "Governance", and they are crucial for the target audience of the journal. That is, the field of "Policy Science": policy cycle, problem identification for analysis, policy environment, resources, stakeholders' analysis, communications (strategic, multilevel, etc.), policy tools and evaluation, etc. Also, these are values, objectives and methodology of the research and policy analysis, policy as the process and reasons for state intervention, evidence-based policy, quantitative and qualitative methods of data processing and the formation of evidence in the policy process and so on. The field of governance is also valuable for research: democratic, good, sensitive, multilevel, digital, and so on: Service State, public consultation, and interaction between government, business and civil society in the policy-making process. Common decisions, power and out of power policy makers, leadership, analysts and policy actors also require semantic and empirical content in the articles of the journal.

This paper examines the impact of undecided voters in elections campaigns in Israel. The question asked here is if undecided voters can break the political dead-lock which became evident in four consecutive elections in just two years – between 2019 and 2021. The paper argues that the crucial role of undecided voters is the result of four main developments. The first is the multi-party parliamentary system, which allows the voters to swing between different parties and influence on handful of options to form coalition government. The parliamentary system emphasizes the excessive and crucial role of small parties to determine who will be in power – which means that they are in a position to impose their extreme ideology on the entire society. The second is that participation in elections is constantly declining, increasing the impact of motivated voters who follow the campaigns closely before making their final decision. The fact that this audience is persuaded by specific events and not by ideology or social identity allows to maximize the impact of their vote. The third is related to technological and cultural changes. Digital and social media have become popular among Israeli young people and first time voters, allowing them to promote new social and political behavior and bypass the censorship of traditional media and the traditional ideology of non-first time voters and the old political establishment.