I conduct an axiomatic analysis of voting rules in a context where voters evaluate each candidate by assigning her an evaluation from a pre-established set. I focus on additive rules, which follow the utilitarian paradigm. Characterization results are provided for each of the two prominent additive rules: Evaluative Voting when the evaluation set is finite and Range Voting when the evaluation set is [0,1].
Conventional democratic institutions aggregate preferences poorly. The norm of one-person-one-vote with majority rule treats people fairly by giving everyone an equal chance to influence outcomes but fails to give proportional weight to people whose interests in a social outcome are stronger than those of other people. This problem leads to the familiar phenomenon of tyranny of the majority. Various institutions that have been tried or proposed over the years to correct this problem-including supermajority rule, weighted voting, cumulative voting, "mixed constitutions," executive discretion, and judicially protected rights-all badly misfire in various ways, for example, by creating gridlock or corruption. This Article proposes a new form of political decisionmaking based on the theory of quadratic voting. It explains how quadratic voting solves the preference-aggregation problem by giving proper weight to preferences of varying intensity, how it can be incorporated into political institutions, and why it should improve equity.
We discuss sincere voting when voters have cardinal preferences over alternatives. We interpret sincerity as opposed to strategic voting, and thus define sincerity as the optimal behaviour when conditions to vote strategically vanish. When voting mechanisms allow for only one message type we show that this optimal behaviour coincides with an intuitive and common definition of sincerity. For voting mechanisms allowing for multiple message types, such as approval voting (AV), there exists no conclusive definition of sincerity in the literature. We show that for AV, voters' optimal strategy tends to one of the existent definitions of sincerity, consisting in voting for those alternatives that yield more than the average of cardinal utilities. ; Financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología through grants BEC 2005-00836, SEJ2005-01481/ECON and FEDER, Generalitat de Catalunya through grant 2005SGR00454 and Barcelona Economics-XREA is gratefully acknowledged.
When a group of people with identical preferences but different abilities in identifying the best alternative (e.g., a jury) takes a vote to decide between two alternatives, the question of strategic voting arises. That is, depending on the voting rule used to determine the collective decision, it may or may not be rational for group members to always vote for the alternative believe to be their private information indicates is better (i.e., vote informatively). In fact, we show in this paper that, if a qualified majority rule is used, then informative voting is rational only if the rule is optimal in the class of all qualified majority rules, in the sense the sense that, when everybody votes informatively, none of the other rules in this class would yield a higher expected utility. However, this necessary condition is not sufficient for informative voting to be rational. Specifically, even if the qualified majority rule used is optimal in the above sense, some of those who are least competent in correctly identifying the better alternative may increase the expected utility by sometimes voting for the alternative they believe to be inferior. A sufficient (but not necessary) condition for informative, non-strategic, voting to be rational is that the voting rule is optimal among the class of all qualified weighted majority rules, i.e., rules assigning (potentially) unequal weights to different individuals, this cannot happen: informative, non-strategic voting is rational.
Voting may seem like simple activity – cast ballots, then count them. Complexity arises, however, because voters must be registered,and votes must be recorded in secrecy, transferred securely and counted accurately. Votes can be lost at every stage of the process. Two simpleproblems are to blame, first registration database error and second poor design of system (ballot or machine). In case of Indian election,electronic voting machine like DRE is used from 2004 election. This machine has its own merits & demerits. Voter cast their vote by going tothe polling booth, where he or she has to press one button next to the candidate. But the voters which are 1000 and more kilometer away fromtheir constituency relay on slow postal system. So can we send our vote to particular EVM (booth) in particular constituency by using internet?This is the main theme of this paper Keyword:. Internet voting, e-voting, Global e-voting, local e-voting, multimodal e-voting, E-VS, Security
The literature on strategic voting has provided evidence that some electors support large parties at the voting booth to avoid wasting their vote on a preferred but uncompetitive smaller party. In this paper we argue that district conditions also elicit reactions from abstainers and other party voters. We find that, when ballot gains and losses from different types of responses to the constituency conditions are taken into account, large parties still benefit moderately from strategic behaviour, while small parties obtain substantial net ballot losses. This result stems from a model that allows for abstention in the choice set of voters, and uses counterfactual simulation to estimate the incidence of district conditions in the Spanish general elections of 2000 and 2008. ; This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through grant CSO2008-01436.
This paper empirically studies the voting outcomes of Egypt's first parliamentary elections after the Arab Spring. In light of the strong Islamist success in the polls, we explore the main determinants of Islamist vs. secular voting. We identify three dimensions that affect voting outcomes at the constituency level: the socio-economic profile, the economic structure and the electoral institutional framework. Our results show that education is negatively associated with Islamist voting. Interestingly, we find significant evidence which suggests that higher poverty levels are associated with a lower vote share for Islamist parties. Later voting stages in the sequential voting setup do not exhibit a bandwagon effect.
In this paper, we present a new way to deal with initiatives, i.e. proposals that can be submitted to voting by the citizens of a democracy. We call it "Assessment Voting". It takes place in two rounds. Before the conclusive voting, a given number of randomly-chosen voters casts its votes. These voters have exercised their right to vote irrevocably. The results from this first round are a good assessment of the outcome to be expected from a voting of all citizens. Once the results of the first round are published, the initiative group has the possibility to withdraw its proposal. It can also choose to proceed, so that the remaining voters now vote in the second round. The results of both rounds are added for the final decision. In response to an Assessment Voting, initiatives may also be revised or counterproposals can be made, triggering a restart of the two-round voting process.
Discussion of shareholder voting frequently begins against a background of the democratic expectations and justifications present in decision-making in the public sphere. Directors are assumed to be agents of the shareholders in much the same way that public officers are representatives of citizens. Recent debates about majority voting and shareholder nomination of directors illustrate this pattern. Yet the corporate process differs in significant ways, partly because the market for shares permits a form of intensity voting and lets markets mediate the outcome in a way that would be foreign to the public setting and partly because the shareholders' role is more limited than that of citizens in the political process. The most developed theory of corporate voting, Easterbrook & Fischel's economic based theory from the 1980s, describes shareholder voting as the best means to fill gaps in incomplete contracts; shareholders as the residual owners have the best economic incentives to exercise such discretion. Such a theory supports unfettered shareholder action substantially broader than what actually exists. In this article, we set out a new theory for shareholder voting based on information theory and more particularly voting as a method of error-correction. Like the prior theory, our approach explains why, among various corporate constituencies, only shareholders may vote. More importantly, our theory provides a more consistent theoretical foundation for explaining the few issues on which shareholders actually do vote. We use this approach to address the recent development of empty voting, a process where investors have used innovations in finance such as derivatives, equity swaps and share lending, to obtain voting rights in a corporation stripped of any financial interest in the company. The error-correction purpose of corporate voting requires that there be alignment between the voting right and the underlying financial interest of shares as has been illustrated in the traditional corporate law practices of ...
International Conference on Advanced Technologies, Computer Engineering and Science (ICATCES'18), May 11-13, 2018 Safranbolu, Turkey ; As an instrument of democracy, voting is a critical issue. Although paper-based voting systems are still used commonly, e-voting systems have started to substitute under favor of improvements in the technology. This situation gives rise to need for secure, reliable, and transparent e-voting systems to make people trust. To do this, there are some security requirements that should be concerned and satisfied such as privacy, fairness, verifiability etc. This study has an educational intuition that analyzes those requirements, theoretical background information related to cryptographic schemes behind them and creates a place-based e-voting design which was implemented for kiosk voting. As a contribution, Paillier homomorphic cryptosystem is used in our system. Moreover, our study includes a detailed criticism for the implemented system in terms of chosen cryptosystems and design modules with security and e-voting requirements. ; 114 ; 119
We introduce `Balanced Voting', a new voting scheme that is particularly suitable for making fundamental societal decisions. Such decisions typically involve subgroups that are strongly in favor of, or against, a new fundamental direction, and others that care much less. In a two-stage procedure, Balanced Voting works as follows: Citizens may abstain from voting on a fundamental direction in a first stage. In a second voting stage, this guarantees them a voting right on the variations of the fundamental direction chosen in the first. All 'losers' from the first stage also obtain voting rights in the second stage, while 'winners' do not. We develop a model with two fundamental directions for which stakes are high for some individuals and with private information about preferences among voters. We demonstrate that Balanced Voting is superior to simple majority voting, Storable Votes and Minority Voting with regard to utilitarian welfare if the voting body is sufficiently large. Moreover, the outcome under Balanced Voting is Pareto-dominant to the outcome under simple majority voting and Minority Voting. We discuss several aspects that need to be considered when Balanced Voting is applied in practice. We also suggest how Balanced Voting could be applied to elections.
We introduce 'Balanced Voting', a new voting scheme that is particularly suitable for making fundamental societal decisions. Such decisions typically involve subgroups that are strongly in favor of, or against, a new fundamental direction, and others that care much less. In a two-stage procedure, Balanced Voting works as follows: Citizens may abstain from voting on a fundamental direction in a first stage. In a second voting stage, this guarantees them a voting right on the variations of the fundamental direction chosen in the first. All losers from the first stage also obtain voting rights in the second stage, while winners do not. We develop a model with two fundamental directions for which stakes are high for some individuals and with private information about preferences among voters. We demonstrate that Balanced Voting is superior to simple majority voting, Storable Votes and Minority Voting with regard to utilitarian welfare if the voting body is sufficiently large. Moreover,the outcome under Balanced Voting is Pareto-dominant to the outcome under simple majority voting and Minority Voting. We discuss several aspects that need to be considered when Balanced Voting is applied in practice. We also suggest how Balanced Voting could be applied to elections.
What are we to make of shareholder voting? Delaware law presents voting as the ideological underpinning of a corporate governance system that gives directors wide control over other people's money. In the legal commentary, there are recurring descriptions of corporations as representative democracies in which New York Alumni Chancellor's Chair in Law & Professor of Management, Vanderbilt University. . Professor of Mathematics and Law, Vanderbilt University. We have benefited from the comments of Jeff Gordon, Sam Issacharoff, Curtis Milhaupt, Larry Ribstein, Lynn Stout, and participants at workshops at New York University, the University of Connecticut, and Emory University, colloquia at Columbia University, Fordham University, the University of Illinois, and the University of Iowa, and the Conference on Shareholder Roles, Shareholder Voting and Corporate Performance at the University of Cagliari. members act through their representatives, reinforcing a legitimacy role for corporate voting allied to political theory. Yet there is reason to wonder if corporate voting requires such a broad foundation. Voting plays a limited role in corporate decisionmaking, much more limited than in the public sphere. Shareholders have binding votes on only two things: the election of directors and ratifying fundamental corporate changes such as mergers. Even in those two areas, legislatures and courts have permitted substantial limits on the exercise of the shareholder franchise. Shareholders seldom seem to care much about the vote even when they have it, usually preferring the "Wall Street rule" (i.e., sell) when they disagree with a decision made by the corporation's managers.
This paper reconsiders the division of the literature on electoral competition into models with forwardlooking voters and those with backward-looking voters by combining ideas from both strands of the literature. As long as there is no uncertainty about voters' policy preferences and parties can commit in advance to a policy platform but not to a maximal level of rent extraction, voters can limit rents to the same extent as in a purely backward-looking model. At the same time, the policy preferred by the median voter is implemented as in a standard forward-looking model of political competition on an ideological policy dimension. Voters achieve this outcome by following a simple lexicographic voting strategy. They cast their vote in favor of their preferred policy position, but make their vote dependent on the incumbent parties' performance in office whenever they are indifferent. When uncertainty about the bliss point of the median voter is introduced into the model, voters have to accept higher rent payments, but they still retain some control over rent extraction.
Prepared under contract/grant no. FE6AC011 by authority of and for the Federal Election Commission, Clearinghouse on Election Administration. ; "PB-270 727, PB-270 728, PB-270 729." ; May 1977. ; Cover title. ; v. 1. Recommended procurement procedures and a review of current equipment.--v. 2. A summary of state voting equipment laws.--v. 3. A guide for legislative drafting. ; Mode of access: Internet.
