Online voting is a trend that is gaining momentum in modern society. It has great potential to decrease organizational costs and increase voter turnout. It eliminates the need to print ballot papers ...or open polling stations—voters can vote from wherever there is an Internet connection. Despite these benefits, online voting solutions are viewed with a great deal of caution because they introduce new threats. A single vulnerability can lead to large-scale manipulations of votes. Electronic voting systems must be legitimate, accurate, safe, and convenient when used for elections. Nonetheless, adoption may be limited by potential problems associated with electronic voting systems. Blockchain technology came into the ground to overcome these issues and offers decentralized nodes for electronic voting and is used to produce electronic voting systems mainly because of their end-to-end verification advantages. This technology is a beautiful replacement for traditional electronic voting solutions with distributed, non-repudiation, and security protection characteristics. The following article gives an overview of electronic voting systems based on blockchain technology. The main goal of this analysis was to examine the current status of blockchain-based voting research and online voting systems and any related difficulties to predict future developments. This study provides a conceptual description of the intended blockchain-based electronic voting application and an introduction to the fundamental structure and characteristics of the blockchain in connection to electronic voting. As a consequence of this study, it was discovered that blockchain systems may help solve some of the issues that now plague election systems. On the other hand, the most often mentioned issues in blockchain applications are privacy protection and transaction speed. For a sustainable blockchain-based electronic voting system, the security of remote participation must be viable, and for scalability, transaction speed must be addressed. Due to these concerns, it was determined that the existing frameworks need to be improved to be utilized in voting systems.
What are the main factors that allow presidents and prime ministers to enact policy through acts of government that carry the force of law? Or, simply put, when does a government actually govern? The ...theory presented in this book provides a major advance in our understanding of statutory policy making. Using a combination of an original analytical framework and statistical techniques, as well as historical and contemporary case studies, the book demonstrates that, contrary to conventional wisdom, variations in legislative passage rates are the consequences of differences in uncertainty, not partisan support. In particular, it shows that a chief executive's legislative success depends on the predictability of legislators' voting behavior and whether buying votes is a feasible option. From a normative standpoint, the book reveals that governability is best served when the opposition has realistic chances of occasionally defeating the executive in the legislative arena.
This book develops and empirically tests a social theory of political participation. It overturns prior understandings of why some people (such as college-degree holders, churchgoers and citizens in ...national rather than local elections) vote more often than others. The book shows that the standard demographic variables are not proxies for variation in the individual costs and benefits of participation, but for systematic variation in the patterns of social ties between potential voters. Potential voters who move in larger social circles, particularly those including politicians and other mobilizing actors, have more access to the flurry of electoral activity prodding citizens to vote and increasing political discussion. Treating voting as a socially defined practice instead of as an individual choice over personal payoffs, a social theory of participation is derived from a mathematical model with behavioral foundations that is empirically calibrated and tested using multiple methods and data sources.
Blockchain-enabled e-voting (BEV) could reduce voter fraud and increase voter access. Eligible voters cast a ballot anonymously using a computer or smartphone. BEV uses an encrypted key and ...tamper-proof personal IDs. This article highlights some BEV implementations and the approach's potential benefits and challenges.
The electronic voting has emerged over time as a replacement to the paper-based voting to reduce the redundancies and inconsistencies. The historical perspective presented in the last two decades ...suggests that it has not been so successful due to the security and privacy flaws observed over time. This paper suggests a framework by using effective hashing techniques to ensure the security of the data. The concept of block creation and block sealing is introduced in this paper. The introduction of a block sealing concept helps in making the blockchain adjustable to meet the need of the polling process. The use of consortium blockchain is suggested, which ensures that the blockchain is owned by a governing body (e.g., election commission), and no unauthorized access can be made from outside. The framework proposed in this paper discusses the effectiveness of the polling process, hashing algorithms' utility, block creation and sealing, data accumulation, and result declaration by using the adjustable blockchain method. This paper claims to apprehend the security and data management challenges in blockchain and provides an improved manifestation of the electronic voting process.
A vast number of e-voting schemes including mix-net-based e-voting, homomorphic e-voting, blind signature-based e-voting, blockchain-based e-voting, post-quantum e-voting, and hybrid e-voting have ...been proposed in the literature for better security and practical implementation. In this paper, we review various e-voting approaches to date. We first compare the structures, advantages, and disadvantages of the different e-voting approaches. We then summarise the security properties of the e-voting approaches in terms of their functional requirements and security requirements. In addition, we provide a comprehensive review of various types of e-voting approaches in terms of their security properties, underlying tools, distinctive features, and weaknesses. We also discuss some practical considerations in the design of e-voting systems. Subsequently, some potential research directions are suggested based on our observations.
Do voters respond to political parties׳ promises or to their past actions? We use a suitable sequence of events in Swedish politics to provide the first answer to this question. In the 1994 election ...campaign the Social Democrats proposed major cuts in transfers to parents with young children, whereas in the 1998 campaign they promised to increase transfers. The Social Democrats won both elections and delivered on both promises. Using voting among parents with slightly older children as counterfactual, we find that voters with young children responded markedly to economic promises rather than to implemented policies.
A smart city refers to an intelligent environment obtained by deploying all available resources and recent technologies in a coordinated and smart manner. Intelligent sensors (Internet of Things ...(IoT) devices) along with 5G technology working mutually are steadily becoming more pervasive and accomplish users' desires more effectively. Among a variety of IoT use cases, e-voting is a considerable application of IoT that relegates it to the next phase in the growth of technologies related to smart cities. In conventional applications, all the devices are often assumed to be cooperative and trusted. However, in practice, devices may be disrupted by the intruders to behave maliciously with the aim of degradation of the network services. Therefore, the privacy and security flaws in the e-voting systems in particular lead to a huge problem where intruders may perform a number of frauds for rigging the polls. Thus, the potential challenge is to distinguish the legitimate IoT devices from the malicious ones by computing their trust values through social optimizer in order to establish a legitimate communication environment. Further, in order to prevent from future modifications of data captured by smart devices, a Blockchain is maintained where blocks of all legitimate IoT devices are recorded. This article has introduced a secure and transparent e-voting mechanism through IoT devices using Blockchain technology with the aim of detecting and resolving the various threats caused by an intruder at various levels. Further, in order to validate the proposed mechanism, it is analyzed against various security parameters such as message alteration, Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack and authentication delay.
We examine the effects of constituents, special interests, and ideology on congressional voting on two of the most significant pieces of legislation in US economic history. Representatives whose ...constituents experience a sharp increase in mortgage defaults are more likely to support the Foreclosure Prevention Act, especially in competitive districts. Interestingly, representatives are more sensitive to defaults of their own-party constituents. Special interests in the form of higher campaign contributions from the financial industry increase the likelihood of supporting the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. However, ideologically conservative representatives are less responsive to both constituent and special interests.
Could changing the locations of polling places affect the outcome of an election by increasing the costs of voting for some and decreasing them for others? The consolidation of voting precincts in ...Los Angeles County during California's 2003 gubernatorial recall election provides a natural experiment for studying how changing polling places influences voter turnout. Overall turnout decreased by a substantial 1.85 percentage points: A drop in polling place turnout of 3.03 percentage points was partially offset by an increase in absentee voting of 1.18 percentage points. Both transportation and search costs caused these changes. Although there is no evidence that the Los Angeles Registrar of Voters changed more polling locations for those registered with one party than for those registered with another, the changing of polling places still had a small partisan effect because those registered as Democrats were more sensitive to changes in costs than those registered as Republicans. The effects were small enough to allay worries about significant electoral consequences in this instance (e.g., the partisan effect might be decisive in only about one in two hundred contested House elections), but large enough to make it possible for someone to affect outcomes by more extensive manipulation of polling place locations.
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