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Voting

Voting is the process by which eligible individuals in a political system express a choice among candidates for office or on specific propositions, typically through casting a ballot in structured elections, serving as a core method of aggregating preferences to legitimize governance.^[1]^[2] This mechanism underpins representative democracies, where periodic voting transfers authority to elected officials accountable to the electorate, though its efficacy relies on informed participation and institutional safeguards against manipulation.^[1] The origins of voting trace to ancient Athens around the 5th century BCE, where adult male citizens directly voted by show of hands or pebbles on laws, leaders, and ostracisms, enabling broad participation in a direct democracy limited to free males excluding women, slaves, and foreigners.^[3] Over centuries, suffrage expanded globally—first to property-owning males, then to women in the early 20th century in many nations—and shifted toward secret ballots to prevent coercion, with modern systems emphasizing universality and equality among eligible voters.^[4] Electoral methods vary, including plurality voting, proportional representation, and ranked-choice systems, each influencing outcomes like representation of minorities and government stability based on empirical analyses of election data.^[5]^[6] Key challenges include persistently low turnout rates, often under 50-60% in voluntary systems like the United States, which undermines democratic legitimacy despite evidence that higher participation correlates with policy responsiveness.^[7] Controversies center on balancing access with integrity, as empirical studies find in-person voter impersonation fraud exceedingly rare—on the order of a few incidents per million votes—but public perceptions of widespread fraud endure, fueling debates over measures like voter ID laws that show negligible turnout suppression effects in rigorous analyses.^[8]^[9] These tensions highlight voting's causal role in causal realism of power allocation, where flawed aggregation can distort representation, yet no system fully escapes paradoxes like cyclical preferences observed in voting theory.^[10]^[11]

History

Origins in Ancient Societies

In ancient Athens, formalized voting practices originated with the constitutional reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BCE, which restructured Attica into 139 demes grouped into ten tribes to broaden political participation beyond aristocratic factions while establishing the Ecclesia as the sovereign assembly. Voting eligibility was confined to free adult male citizens—free-born males typically over 18 years old, numbering around 30,000 in the early fifth century BCE amid a total population of roughly 250,000—explicitly excluding women, slaves (who comprised about 20-30% of the populace), and metics (resident foreigners). Assembly decisions, attended by hundreds to thousands, were primarily determined by cheirotonia, a public show-of-hands vote overseen and tallied by elected clerks, with sortition by lot employed for selecting the Council of 500 to distribute power and avert elite monopolization.^[12] Ostracism, instituted shortly after Cleisthenes' reforms, provided a mechanism for preemptive exile of perceived threats to stability, requiring a preliminary Ecclesia vote followed by a secret ballot using inscribed ostraca (potsherds); at least 6,000 valid votes targeted an individual for a decade's banishment without trial or property loss. Archaeological excavations, including caches of over 10,000 ostraca from the fifth century BCE found in Athenian wells and dumps, reveal names like Themistocles (ostracized in 471 BCE) scratched repeatedly, indicating organized campaigning and use among propertied citizens—often hoplites or landowners—as a tool for factional equilibrium rather than egalitarian input.^[13] The Roman Republic, founded around 509 BCE after expelling the monarchy, institutionalized voting in comitia assemblies like the centuriate (for magistrates and war declarations) and tribal (for laws), where adult male citizens voted orally in hierarchical units: the 193-century system allocated 70% of votes to the wealthiest 5-10% of participants based on property censuses, ensuring consensus skewed toward elites. Voice voting predominated until the late Republic, when intimidation prompted reforms; the Lex Gabinia tabellaria of 139 BCE mandated secret ballots via wax-scribbled wooden tablets for consular elections, extended to legislation by subsequent laws (137, 131, 107 BCE), though assembly turnout rarely exceeded 10-20% of eligible voters (estimated 200,000-300,000 by the second century BCE). Surviving evidence includes descriptions of fenced voting lanes (cordonatae saepta) and rare wax tablet fragments, affirming voting's function in ratifying patrician-plebeian pacts among property-holding males, not mass equality.^[14]^[15]

Medieval and Early Modern Developments

In medieval Europe, decision-making in assemblies transitioned from feudal consensus mechanisms, such as acclamation in royal councils, to more formalized voting among limited elites. The English Parliament, convened regularly from the 1260s under Simon de Montfort and formalized in the Model Parliament of 1295 by Edward I, initially relied on acclamation—shouts of approval or dissent—among lords spiritual and temporal, with knights and burgesses providing advisory input through similar vocal or hand-showing methods.^[16]^[17] This evolution reflected a practical need for the crown to secure consent for taxation and war funding from those with direct stakes, as voting rights were confined to propertied representatives capable of bearing fiscal burdens. By the early modern period, structured voting emerged in estates-general and parliaments across Europe, yet participation remained sharply restricted by property qualifications to ensure voters had skin in the game, mitigating risks of impulsive majorities. Land ownership served as a proxy for informed judgment, given widespread illiteracy among the unpropertied—rates below 20% in rural populations circa 1500—and the causal link between economic independence and rational deliberation on policy impacts. Assemblies like the French Estates-General of 1614 or the Imperial Diet required delegates from nobility and towns to vote by estate or voice, often aiming for consensus to avoid deadlock, underscoring a preference for qualified unanimity over raw majoritarianism.^[18] A stark illustration of unanimity's perils appeared in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's Sejm, where the liberum veto—allowing any noble deputy to nullify legislation with a single objection—was first invoked in 1652 during debates over royal election procedures. This practice, rooted in noble equality principles, paralyzed governance by enabling foreign-influenced vetoes, contributing to legislative gridlock in over 50% of sessions by the late 17th century and ultimately weakening the state against partitions.^[19] Such mechanisms highlighted the trade-offs of elite-restricted voting: while preventing hasty decisions by untutored masses, they invited abuse when unanimity empowered outliers over collective welfare.^[20]

19th-Century Suffrage Reforms

In the United States during the 1820s and 1830s, known as the Jacksonian era, most states eliminated property ownership and taxpaying requirements for voting, thereby extending suffrage to nearly all white adult males regardless of economic status.^[21] This shift, championed by supporters of President Andrew Jackson, transformed the electorate by increasing participation rates and fostering the rise of organized political parties, though it also facilitated the development of patronage-based machines that prioritized loyalty over merit.^[22] By 1832, all states except South Carolina selected presidential electors through popular vote, a change that amplified the influence of the expanded white male voter base.^[22] In Britain, the Reform Act of 1832 addressed longstanding electoral inequities by redistributing parliamentary seats from unpopulated "rotten boroughs" to growing industrial cities and enfranchising middle-class men who occupied property valued at £10 annually or rented at £50.^[23] The act expanded the electorate from approximately 400,000 to 650,000 voters, primarily benefiting the propertied middle class emergent from industrialization, while maintaining exclusions for most working-class men lacking sufficient property.^[24] Critics, including radicals and Chartists, condemned the measure for failing to grant universal male suffrage, viewing it as a limited concession to avert broader unrest amid nationalist calls for representative legitimacy.^[24] Early limited extensions of voting rights to women appeared in New Jersey under the 1790 election law, which used gender-neutral language permitting "he or she" to vote, allowing propertied unmarried women and widows to participate in state and federal elections for over a decade.^[25] This anomaly, unique among U.S. states at the time, ended in 1807 when the legislature revoked suffrage from women, free Black voters, and recent immigrants, citing abuses like fraudulent voting and partisan manipulation.^[26] The revocation underscored persistent restrictions based on gender and property, presaging 19th-century debates over women's presumed lack of political competence despite evidence of their orderly participation.^[25] Throughout the century, such reforms balanced incremental inclusions for white propertied or middling males against entrenched barriers for women, laborers, and non-whites, reflecting tensions between expanding representation and preserving elite control.^[21]

20th-Century Expansions and Civil Rights

The 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified on August 18, 1920, prohibited denial of voting rights on the basis of sex, marking a major expansion of suffrage to women nationwide.^[27] In the 1920 presidential election, women's turnout was approximately 36 percent compared to 68 percent for men, reflecting initial barriers like literacy and property restrictions in some states, though these gaps narrowed gradually over subsequent decades as mobilization efforts increased participation rates.^[28] Internationally, New Zealand achieved the first national women's suffrage in a self-governing polity on September 19, 1893, through legislation enabling women to vote in parliamentary elections, a milestone that influenced subsequent reforms in Australia (1902) and Finland (1906).^[29] By mid-century, suffrage expansions accelerated post-World War I and II, with countries like the United Kingdom granting full female enfranchisement in 1928 and France in 1944, contributing to broader democratic norms but with varying immediate effects on turnout due to cultural and logistical factors.^[30] In the United States, the 15th Amendment, ratified on February 3, 1870, aimed to secure voting rights for black males irrespective of race, yet Southern Jim Crow laws—including poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation—effectively disenfranchised most African Americans until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.^[31] The 1965 Act, signed August 6, suspended literacy tests and authorized federal oversight in discriminatory jurisdictions, leading to a sharp rise in black voter registration from about 29 percent in Mississippi in 1964 to 59 percent by 1967, and increased turnout in subsequent elections.^[32] ^[33] These reforms empirically boosted overall participation in affected areas, though persistent socioeconomic disparities moderated long-term turnout gains.^[34] Post-colonial expansions in Africa and Asia during the mid-20th century often introduced universal adult suffrage upon independence, as in India’s 1950 constitution and numerous African nations in the 1960s, yet many transitioned to de facto one-party dominance due to weak institutional checks and ethnic patronage networks.^[35] Empirical analyses show that while formal suffrage increased registered voters and initial turnout—evident in high participation rates during early independence elections—these systems frequently devolved into authoritarianism, with ruling parties maintaining power through electoral manipulations, correlating with reduced political stability compared to gradual reformers.^[36] Overall, 20th-century suffrage growth elevated global turnout averages but yielded mixed stability outcomes, as rapid inclusions without robust civic infrastructure sometimes exacerbated factional conflicts rather than fostering consensus.^[37]

Post-1970 Reforms and Restrictions

The Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified on July 1, 1971, lowered the national voting age from 21 to 18, addressing inconsistencies where 18-year-olds faced military draft obligations during the Vietnam War without electoral voice.^[38] Congress proposed the amendment on March 23, 1971, following the Supreme Court's Oregon v. Mitchell (1970) ruling that limited federal authority to change state voting ages, prompting rapid state ratifications—38 states within 100 days—to ensure uniformity for the 1972 elections.^[39] This reform enfranchised approximately 11 million young Americans, though subsequent youth turnout remained low; for instance, only about 50% of 18- to 29-year-olds voted in the 2020 presidential election, up from historically dismal rates since 1971, with studies indicating limited shifts in policy outcomes due to inconsistent participation and bloc voting patterns.^[40] Globally, post-1970 adjustments solidified 18 as the standard minimum voting age in many democracies, building on earlier trends but with targeted reforms amid youth activism. In the United Kingdom, the Representation of the People Act 1969 reduced the age to 18 effective February 1970, influencing similar changes elsewhere, while countries like Austria later experimented with 16 for national elections in 2007 to boost engagement, though evidence shows marginal increases in turnout without transformative policy effects.^[41] Compulsory voting systems, entrenched in nations such as Australia (since 1924 with post-1970 enforcement mechanisms) and Belgium, sustained high turnout rates—often exceeding 90%—compared to voluntary systems, yet research suggests elevated participation does not guarantee more informed or rational voter choices, as coerced votes may reflect apathy or minimal information rather than deliberate preference.^[42] Restrictions emerged as counterbalances, particularly in the US, where felon disenfranchisement laws persisted, affecting an estimated 4.4 million people as of 2022 across 48 states that bar voting during incarceration, with 25 states extending bans to probation or parole periods.^[43] Proponents justify these measures citing high recidivism rates—Bureau of Justice Statistics data indicate about 83% of state prisoners rearrested within nine years of release—arguing that individuals demonstrating repeated disregard for societal laws forfeit temporary civic privileges to maintain electoral integrity and public trust in governance. Voter identification requirements intensified post-2000 following the contested 2000 presidential election, with states like Indiana enacting strict photo ID laws in 2005 (upheld by the Supreme Court in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 2008), leading to 36 states mandating some ID by 2021; advocates claim these deter potential in-person fraud, though documented instances remain rare, at rates below 0.0001% of votes cast.^[44]^[45]

Theoretical Foundations

Justifications in Democratic Theory

Democratic theory posits that voting serves as a mechanism for expressing consent to governance, a principle rooted in John Locke's social contract framework outlined in his Second Treatise of Government (1689), where legitimate authority derives from the governed's agreement to surrender certain natural rights for protection, with participation in political processes implying tacit or express consent.^[46] This consent-based legitimacy underpins the stability of representative systems, as regimes enabling broad electoral participation demonstrate lower incidence of civil unrest compared to non-consensual autocracies; for instance, cross-national data from 1946 to 2020 indicate that democracies averaging above 70% voter turnout experience 25% fewer coups or major protests than those below 50%.^[47] Locke's emphasis on consent counters absolutist claims by tying governmental validity to ongoing public affirmation, a causal link evident in empirical patterns where high voluntary participation correlates with sustained institutional durability absent in coerced systems.^[48] John Stuart Mill advanced representational justifications in Considerations on Representative Government (1861), arguing that voting aggregates diverse interests to prevent tyranny of the majority while ensuring competent rule, though he critiqued unqualified universal suffrage for empowering the uninformed over the educated, proposing plural votes—up to multiple ballots—for those with higher qualifications like university education or skilled professions to weight outcomes toward expertise.^[49] Mill viewed representation not as mere numerical equality but as a deliberative process refining public will, where voting incentivizes civic education and holds delegates accountable, fostering policies aligned with long-term societal welfare rather than short-term populism.^[50] This approach, grounded in utilitarian calculus, posits that informed electorates yield superior governance outcomes, as evidenced by historical reforms in Britain post-1867 where expanded but tiered enfranchisement preceded economic stability gains without descending into mob rule.^[51] Contemporary theorists extend these foundations by linking voting to democratic legitimacy through performative representation, where electoral participation signals collective authorization of rulers, enhancing perceived fairness and compliance even amid policy disagreements.^[52] Panel studies across 30 democracies from 1990 to 2018 reveal positive bidirectional causality between turnout and satisfaction with democratic processes, with nations like Denmark (turnout ~85%) reporting 20-30% higher citizen approval ratings than low-turnout peers like the U.S. (~60%), contrasting sharply with autocracies where turnout exceeds 90% via mandates but satisfaction lags due to absent genuine consent.^[53]^[54] Such correlations underscore voting's role in causal realism: it not only legitimizes outcomes via aggregative consent but also cultivates accountability, reducing governance failures observed in non-participatory regimes.^[55]

Rationality and Individual Incentives

In economic models of voter behavior, individuals rationally compare the private costs of voting—typically time, effort, and minor logistical expenses—with the expected benefits, calculated as the probability of their vote being pivotal multiplied by the utility differential between their preferred candidate winning and losing. Anthony Downs formalized this in 1957, positing that in mass elections with millions of participants, the pivotal probability approaches zero, making the net expected benefit negative and thus rendering participation irrational for self-interested actors focused on policy outcomes. Empirical turnout data contradicts pure instrumental rationality: U.S. presidential elections see approximately 60% participation among eligible voters on average since 1960, rising to 65.3% in 2024, despite pivotal odds estimated at roughly 1 in 60 million for a typical voter in close contests.^[56]^[57]^[58] This discrepancy, known as the paradox of voting, persists because models extended by Riker and Ordeshook incorporate a "D" term for non-instrumental factors, such as intrinsic satisfaction from fulfilling civic duty or expressing personal values, which provides utility regardless of decisiveness.^[59] Field experiments reinforce that social norms, rather than policy sway, predominantly motivate turnout; for example, mailed reminders disclosing recipients' past non-voting alongside neighbors' records boosted participation by 8.1 percentage points in U.S. midterm elections, as conformity pressures outweigh negligible individual influence on results.^[60] Such norms operate through reputational incentives and internalized obligations, explaining sustained participation even when voters acknowledge low stakes. Critiques highlight risks from these dynamics: low-information rational ignorance allows systematic cognitive biases to flourish, as voters face no personal penalty for errors that aggregate into poor collective choices. Bryan Caplan's 2007 analysis identifies four empirically prevalent voter biases—anti-market pessimism, antiforeign bias, make-work bias, and pessimistic bias—rooted in ideological priors over evidence, fostering preferences for inefficient policies like trade barriers or excessive regulation, since democratic incentives reward expressive over accurate signaling.^[61]^[62] These patterns hold in survey data comparing lay opinions to economists', where median voter errors diverge sharply on economic fundamentals, amplifying deviations from first-best outcomes.^[63]

Impossibility and Aggregation Problems

Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem, formally stated in his 1951 monograph Social Choice and Individual Values, proves that no rank-order voting procedure can aggregate individual preferences into a collective preference ordering that simultaneously satisfies four key axioms: unrestricted domain (all possible preference profiles are admissible), Pareto efficiency (if every voter prefers one alternative to another, the collective should too), independence of irrelevant alternatives (the relative ranking of two options depends only on preferences between them, not on third options), and non-dictatorship (no single voter determines the collective outcome unilaterally).^[64]^[65] The theorem implies that any non-dictatorial voting system will either produce intransitive (cyclic) social preferences or violate one of the other axioms, rendering fair and consistent aggregation mathematically impossible under these constraints.^[66] A foundational illustration of such aggregation failures is the Condorcet paradox, identified by the Marquis de Condorcet in the late 18th century, where pairwise majority preferences form a cycle despite transitive individual rankings.^[67] For example, with three voters and candidates A, B, and C: one ranks A > B > C, another B > C > A, and the third C > A > B; majorities then favor A over B, B over C, and C over A, yielding no stable winner and irrational collective preferences. While rare in large-scale elections due to probabilistic tendencies toward transitivity, empirical cycles have appeared in surveys, such as a 1987 Danish poll where voter preferences over prime ministerial candidates exhibited a Condorcet cycle among the top three options.^[68] These theoretical impossibilities manifest empirically in institutional designs that prioritize other goals over pure preference aggregation, such as the U.S. Electoral College, which has produced outcomes diverging from the national popular vote. In the 2000 presidential election, Democrat Al Gore received 48.4% of the popular vote (50,999,897 votes) to Republican George W. Bush's 47.9% (50,456,002 votes), yet Bush secured 271 electoral votes to Gore's 266.^[69]^[70] Similarly, in 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton won 48.2% of the popular vote (65,853,514 votes) against Republican Donald Trump's 46.1% (62,984,828 votes), but Trump prevailed with 304 electoral votes to Clinton's 227.^[71]^[72] Such discrepancies highlight how electoral rules can amplify underlying aggregation challenges, favoring geographic concentration over nationwide majorities without resolving the core paradoxes of social choice.^[73]^[74]

Critiques from Public Choice Theory

Public choice theory critiques voting by modeling political actors—voters, legislators, and bureaucrats—as self-interested utility maximizers, akin to economic agents in markets, leading to systematic inefficiencies rather than optimal collective outcomes.^[75] Pioneered by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in The Calculus of Consent (1962), this framework argues that majority voting imposes external costs on minorities, as coalitions form to extract rents through logrolling—explicit vote-trading among legislators to bundle unrelated policies, prioritizing concentrated benefits for special interests over dispersed voter costs.^[76] Empirical analysis of U.S. congressional roll-call votes across multiple sessions reveals logrolling patterns where members exchange support on district-specific provisions, distorting policy toward pork-barrel spending estimated at 10-20% of federal discretionary budgets in the 2010s.^[77] Special interests amplify these distortions via rent-seeking, investing resources to capture regulatory favors or subsidies with high private returns but negligible per-voter costs, often outweighing the signaling power of mass elections.^[78] In the U.S., annual lobbying expenditures surpassed $4.1 billion in 2022, enabling groups to influence outcomes on issues like agricultural subsidies or tax loopholes, where individual voter influence remains probabilistically near zero given typical turnout exceeding 100 million ballots per presidential election.^[79] This dynamic favors organized minorities over unorganized majorities, as Buchanan and Tullock predicted, with studies showing legislative voting aligns more closely with donor priorities during low media scrutiny periods than with constituent preferences.^[78] Voter ignorance exacerbates these flaws, as rational actors minimize information acquisition costs when the decisive marginal benefit of one vote approaches zero, per public choice models of rational abstention.^[75] Ilya Somin's analysis documents pervasive low-information voting, with surveys from the 2010s indicating that only about 35% of Americans could name the three branches of government and fewer than 50% correctly identified key policy details, such as the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate implications.^[80] This enables demagogic or redistributive policies, as uninformed electorates undervalue fiscal trade-offs, facilitating expansions in welfare programs without corresponding tax awareness. Causal patterns link universal suffrage expansions to heightened fiscal pressures in post-World War II welfare states, where broadened voter bases correlated with government spending surges—rising from under 30% of GDP in 1950 to over 50% by the 1980s in countries like Sweden and the UK—often financed by debt accumulation exceeding 100% of GDP by the 2010s, as majority coalitions pursued short-term entitlements over intergenerational equity.^[81] Public choice attributes this to median-voter incentives favoring immediate transfers, with empirical cross-national data showing higher debt-to-GDP ratios in democracies with lower property qualifications post-suffrage reforms compared to restricted franchises historically.^[82]

Contexts of Application

National and Local Elections

In national elections, voting serves to select representatives to legislative bodies or executives through district-based or list-based systems. Majoritarian systems, such as first-past-the-post (FPTP), allocate seats in single-member districts to the candidate receiving the plurality of votes, as employed in the United Kingdom's general elections and the United States House of Representatives.^[83] This mechanism, per Duverger's law, empirically fosters two-party dominance by incentivizing strategic voting and candidate entry deterrence, reducing third-party viability through vote-splitting dynamics observed in close races.^[84] In the UK, FPTP has contributed to governmental stability via clear majorities, exemplified by the 2024 general election where the Labour Party secured 412 of 650 seats despite 33.7% of the vote share, enabling decisive policy implementation without immediate coalition negotiations.^[85] Proportional representation (PR) systems, conversely, distribute seats in multi-member districts or via party lists according to vote shares, often yielding multi-party legislatures and coalition governments. Countries like Germany and the Netherlands exemplify this, where PR has sustained effective party numbers above 3.0, contrasting FPTP's typical 2.0-2.5, though it correlates with higher fragmentation and negotiation delays post-election.^[86] In closed-list PR variants, voters select parties rather than rank individuals, with seat allocation determined by pre-set party orders, thereby diminishing direct voter influence over specific candidates and enhancing party leadership control.^[87] Empirical analyses indicate PR elevates representation of minority views but risks governmental instability from coalition breakdowns, as seen in Italy's frequent cabinet changes prior to 1990s reforms.^[88] Local elections, typically mirroring national systems at smaller scales like municipalities or councils, exhibit markedly lower voter turnout due to diminished perceived stakes and reduced media salience. In the United States, municipal election participation averages 20-30%, with mayoral races often drawing only one in five eligible voters, as voters weigh local outcomes as less consequential than national policy shifts.^[89] Factors include spatial distance from decision impacts and lower campaign visibility, empirically linking turnout inversely to election scope in panel studies across U.S. jurisdictions.^[90] This abstention persists despite local governance handling core services like education and policing, underscoring rational ignorance where individual votes influence outcomes minimally in low-salience contests.^[91]

Direct Democracy Mechanisms

Direct democracy mechanisms enable citizens to vote directly on policies through instruments such as referendums, which require voter approval for legislative or constitutional changes; popular initiatives, allowing citizens to propose new laws; and plebiscites, often advisory votes on specific issues. These tools supplement representative systems by permitting public override of elite decisions or initiation of reforms unresponsive to legislative priorities. Empirical assessments reveal mixed outcomes: enhanced policy alignment with median voter preferences in some contexts, alongside risks of volatility from low-information voting and influence by organized interests.^[92] In Switzerland, direct democracy has operated federally since the 1848 constitution, which mandated referendums for constitutional amendments and enabled popular initiatives from 1891, with cantonal systems predating and featuring even broader application. Cantons hold referendums on fiscal matters and legislation, averaging several annually across levels, contributing to roughly 7-10 national or subnational votes per year. Panel data from 1980-1998 across cantons show mandatory referendums correlated with 19% lower government spending relative to non-referendum peers, indicating fiscal restraint and responsiveness to taxpayer preferences over expansive elite agendas. However, field experiments confirm heightened legislator responsiveness to constituents, yet critics note potential elite capture through agenda-setting and information asymmetries, as initiatives often rely on party or interest-funded campaigns that shape voter perceptions.^[93]^[94]^[92] The United States employs citizen initiatives primarily at the state level, with the process first successfully implemented in Oregon in 1902 following adoption in 1898 alongside South Dakota. As of 2023, 26 states permit statewide initiatives for statutes or amendments, enabling voters to enact policies like tax limitations bypassing resistant legislatures. California's Proposition 13, approved by 65% in June 1978, capped property tax rates at 1% of assessed value and required two-thirds legislative supermajorities for new taxes, immediately slashing property tax revenues by approximately $5 billion and prompting subsequent state interventions in local funding. Outcomes include sustained fiscal conservatism, with reduced overall state-local spending growth, though it strained infrastructure and education budgets, highlighting trade-offs between voter-driven restraint and long-term public goods provision.^[95]^[96]) The 2016 Brexit referendum exemplifies plebiscite volatility, where the United Kingdom's non-binding vote on EU membership saw 51.9% favor leaving on a 72.2% turnout of 46.5 million eligible voters. Implementation faced protracted negotiations, culminating in the 2020 withdrawal agreement amid disputes over trade barriers and Northern Ireland protocols. Economic analyses attribute a 2-4% GDP shortfall to Brexit-related trade disruptions and uncertainty, with import prices rising due to policy ambiguity post-referendum. Polls from 2019-2023 indicate majority retrospective regret, with 50-55% favoring Remain in repeated surveys, underscoring challenges of binary choices on complex integrations without reversal mechanisms.^[97]^[98]

Organizational and Corporate Voting

In deliberative assemblies such as non-governmental organizations, labor unions, and professional associations, voting procedures are often governed by Robert's Rules of Order, first published in 1876 by U.S. Army engineer Henry Martyn Robert to adapt congressional practices for ordinary societies.^[99] These rules outline methods including voice votes—where members orally affirm "aye" or "no"—rising votes for clarity in small groups, and secret ballots for sensitive quorum-dependent decisions like electing officers or amending bylaws.^[100] Ballots ensure anonymity and are required when secrecy protects against undue influence, as in union contract approvals or NGO policy changes.^[101] Corporate voting centers on shareholder rights to influence governance, typically adhering to the one-share-one-vote principle that allocates influence proportional to equity ownership, though dual-class structures in some firms (e.g., tech companies) grant founders enhanced control.^[102] Shareholders vote annually on director elections, executive compensation, mergers, and shareholder proposals, with proxy voting enabling remote participation via delegated forms or electronic platforms to accommodate dispersed ownership.^[103] In the 2020s, activist investors have intensified proxy battles to sway boards on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies; for instance, Engine No. 1's 2021 campaign at ExxonMobil secured three board seats with just 0.02% ownership by rallying institutional support for climate-focused strategies.^[104] Participation in organizational and corporate voting remains low, particularly among retail shareholders, who voted 29.6% of their held shares in the 2023 U.S. proxy season, up slightly from 29.4% in 2022, reflecting limited engagement due to information costs and perceived marginal impact.^[105] This mirrors patterns of apathy in political voting, where rational ignorance prevails as individual actions rarely sway outcomes in large groups, though institutional investors vote over 90% of their shares, amplifying their influence.^[106] Low retail turnout underscores challenges in mobilizing diffuse stakeholders, often requiring proxy advisory firms like ISS or Glass Lewis to guide decisions.^[107]

Methods and Technologies

Manual Voting Techniques

Manual voting techniques involve voters physically signaling preferences without mechanical or digital aids, encompassing voice declarations, visual displays, and paper markings followed by hand tabulation. These methods prioritize simplicity and direct human oversight, historically dominating elections due to their accessibility in pre-industrial societies. Their reliability stems from physical evidence trails, enabling recounts, though susceptible to human variability in counting and pre-ballot influences like coercion. Voice voting, known as viva voce, requires individuals to orally announce choices to officials, a practice common in early U.S. state elections through the early 19th century and persisting in New England town meetings for local decisions. This approach facilitates rapid aggregation in small groups but compromises secrecy, exposing voters to peer pressure, employer retaliation, or communal intimidation, as observed in colonial assemblies where public declarations reinforced social conformity.^[108] Show-of-hands variants extend this for non-secret, low-stakes votes, tallying raised hands visually, yet they amplify visibility risks and prove impractical beyond dozens of participants due to accuracy challenges in distinguishing affirmatives from abstentions. Open ballot systems, prevalent in 19th-century U.S. elections, mandated voters to verbally state or publicly present pre-printed party tickets, allowing witnesses—including candidates and operatives—to monitor choices and prevent duplicates via poll books.^[109] While intended for transparency against fraud, these exposed voters to bribery, with parties distributing cash or alcohol to tracked supporters, exacerbating turnout among compliant demographics while deterring independents or minorities through observable reprisals.^[110] Such visibility enabled vote buying on a systemic scale, as detailed in historical accounts of Gilded Age contests where public rolls facilitated post-election verification of inducements.^[111] The secret paper ballot, pioneered in South Australia in 1856 alongside universal male suffrage, standardized uniform government-printed sheets marked privately by voters, folded for anonymity, and deposited in locked boxes for manual sorting and counting.^[112] This innovation curtailed external pressures by concealing preferences from intermediaries, spreading globally to mitigate the coercion endemic in prior regimes.^[113] Hand tabulation of these ballots permits precinct-level verification, with empirical audits revealing discrepancy rates typically under 1% in supervised recounts, attributable more to marking ambiguities than aggregation errors.^[114] Post-election risk-limiting audits of paper records further affirm outcomes, confirming manual processes' robustness when paired with procedural safeguards like bipartisan teams and chain-of-custody logs.^[115]

Electronic and Machine-Based Systems

Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines emerged in the United States during the late 1990s, utilizing touchscreens to allow voters to select choices directly into electronic memory without producing a paper record in many implementations.^[116] These systems aimed to replace older mechanical lever machines and punch-card ballots, with initial deployments in states like Georgia and Maryland by 2002, often certified under varying state standards that permitted software-only voting without verifiable trails.^[117] However, DREs faced criticism for lacking auditability, as votes existed solely in proprietary software prone to glitches, with empirical evidence of malfunctions including calibration errors and interface failures documented in post-election analyses.^[118] A prominent example occurred in the 2006 U.S. House election for Florida's 13th Congressional District in Sarasota County, where ES&S iVotronic DRE machines recorded an anomalous 14.9% undervote rate—over twice the average in other races—despite high turnout and voter interest, with investigations attributing potential causes to poor touchscreen usability and unresolvable software issues rather than intentional fraud.^[119]^[120] The U.S. Government Accountability Office's subsequent testing of these machines revealed intermittent failures in vote recording and tabulation, underscoring systemic reliability concerns in DREs without voter-verified paper audit trails (VVPAT).^[120] Such incidents contributed to declining DRE usage, with only about 9% of U.S. jurisdictions relying solely on them by 2018, as jurisdictions shifted toward systems enabling post-election verification.^[121] The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, enacted on October 29, accelerated the transition from punch-card and lever systems to more reliable technologies, allocating federal funds for states to adopt either DREs or optical scan systems while mandating accessibility features like audio ballots for disabled voters.^[122] Optical scan systems, which involve voters marking paper ballots that are then digitized via scanners, became predominant, comprising over 70% of U.S. voting equipment by the mid-2010s due to their hybrid nature preserving physical records for manual audits.^[121] Empirical audits, including risk-limiting statistical methods, have demonstrated optical scan accuracy exceeding 99% in verified contests when paired with hand recounts of paper ballots, as seen in Colorado's statewide post-election audits from 2017 onward, where discrepancies rarely exceeded 0.5% and were attributable to human marking errors rather than machine faults.^[123]^[124] Recent experiments with blockchain-integrated voting, such as Voatz app pilots in limited U.S. municipal elections through 2023, have promised immutable ledgers for vote storage but remain unproven at scale, with cybersecurity analyses highlighting persistent vulnerabilities including remote code execution and voter authentication flaws exploitable by nation-state actors.^[125]^[126] Independent reports from MIT and others critique blockchain's application to voting as exacerbating internet-based risks without resolving core issues like end-to-end verifiability or resistance to coercion, given that distributed ledgers cannot retroactively secure compromised ballot casting in high-stakes environments.^[127]^[128] These systems have been deployed in small trials, such as West Virginia's 2018 overseas military voting, but empirical failure rates in simulated attacks exceed 20% for key protections, prompting experts to deem them unsuitable for widespread adoption absent fundamental cryptographic and procedural breakthroughs.^[127]^[129]

Remote and Proxy Voting Options

Remote voting methods enable participation without physical presence at polling stations, offering convenience for those with mobility issues, geographic barriers, or scheduling conflicts, but they introduce trade-offs in verification and security compared to in-person voting, where voter identity and ballot integrity can be directly observed.^[130] These options expanded significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, with mail-in ballots in the United States comprising 43% of total votes in the 2020 presidential election due to relaxed absentee requirements in many states.^[131] While such systems boost turnout—empirical analyses indicate mail voting correlates with higher participation rates without evidence of outcome-altering fraud— they rely on safeguards like signature matching and ballot tracking, which mitigate but do not fully eliminate risks such as ballot harvesting or erroneous double-voting.^[132] ^[133] Mail-in and absentee voting, long available for specific excuses like military service or illness, proliferated post-2020 in jurisdictions like all-mail states (e.g., Colorado, Oregon), where voters receive ballots automatically.^[134] Proponents cite accessibility benefits, with rejection rates for absentee ballots averaging under 1% nationally in 2020 after signature verification processes, which compare submitted signatures against registration records to confirm authenticity.^[135] However, audits in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania identified isolated double-voting cases—where individuals attempted votes both in-person and by mail—totaling dozens amid millions of ballots, often caught via cross-checks but highlighting gaps in real-time detection absent stricter ID requirements. Fraud rates remain empirically low, with comprehensive reviews finding no systemic increase from mail voting expansions, though critics argue inherent separation of voter from counting process elevates coercion or forgery opportunities over supervised polling.^[136] ^[137] Proxy voting, where a designated representative casts a ballot on behalf of an absent voter, is rarer in public elections but permitted in some legislative bodies for continuity during disruptions. In the UK House of Commons, temporary proxy rules introduced on April 21, 2020, allowed MPs unable to attend due to COVID-19 or shielding to nominate proxies for divisions, extended through November 2020 for broader health-related absences.^[138] This facilitated participation but sparked debates on diluted representation, as proxies vote per the principal's instructions without direct debate input, potentially undermining the causal link between elected officials' presence and constituent accountability.^[139] Similar concerns arise in corporate or organizational contexts, where proxy dilution can skew outcomes if principals lack full information, though empirical data on legislative proxies shows no widespread abuse, emphasizing instead procedural trade-offs against absenteeism.^[140] Online or internet voting represents an experimental frontier, with Estonia pioneering i-voting for parliamentary elections starting in 2005, enabling remote submission via authenticated digital IDs.^[141] Adoption grew rapidly, accounting for up to 44% of votes in the 2019 election and correlating with turnout increases of 3-5 percentage points in early implementations, as convenience drew previously non-participating demographics.^[142] Yet security analyses, including a 2014 study of the system, exposed vulnerabilities such as potential server-side vote alteration undetectable by voters and risks from malware compromising client devices, with earlier 2011 election protocols susceptible to similar exploits absent end-to-end verifiability.^[143] These flaws underscore causal risks in remote digital systems—where ballots traverse unsecured networks—outweighing benefits in non-binding trials, prompting ongoing reforms like enhanced encryption, though no confirmed election manipulations have occurred.^[144] Overall, remote options prioritize access over ironclad oversight, with data indicating minimal fraud incidence but persistent theoretical vulnerabilities demanding robust, auditable protocols.^[145]

Controversies and Risks

Claims of Voter Fraud and Integrity Measures

The Heritage Foundation's database documents 1,500 proven instances of election fraud in the United States from 1982 through 2023, including cases of illegal voting by noncitizens, duplicate voting, and absentee ballot misuse, though it represents a non-exhaustive sampling of prosecuted violations. These cases, often resulting in felony convictions, demonstrate that while fraud does not occur at scale sufficient to overturn national outcomes, localized irregularities persist without robust safeguards, contradicting claims of its virtual nonexistence from outlets with documented institutional biases. Proven noncitizen voting incidents, though comprising a small fraction of total fraud, number in the dozens across decades, with examples including convictions in states like Texas and North Carolina for undocumented immigrants casting ballots.^[146] Post-2020 election audits in battleground states underscored the narrow margins that amplify the impact of even limited fraud. In Georgia, a full hand recount of over 5 million ballots in November 2020, followed by a machine recount and recertification in December, confirmed Joe Biden's victory by 11,779 votes, narrowing the initial lead slightly but revealing no systemic discrepancies beyond human errors in counting.^[147] Such audits, involving bipartisan observers and risk-limiting statistical sampling in some jurisdictions, detected isolated issues like unsecured drop boxes or improper ballot handling but affirmed overall integrity while highlighting vulnerabilities in chain-of-custody protocols for mail-in ballots.^[148] Integrity measures include voter identification requirements, adopted in 36 states as of 2025, which mandate photo ID or alternative verification to prevent impersonation.^[149] Gallup polling consistently shows broad public support for photo ID laws, with 81% of Americans favoring them in 2022 and majorities across parties endorsing verification to enhance trust in results.^[150] ^[151] States implementing strict ID laws report higher voter confidence, as these deter fraud without evidence of disproportionate disenfranchisement of eligible voters, per empirical reviews. Additional protocols, such as witnessed absentee voting, secure transport of ballots, and real-time tracking, form multi-layered defenses against tampering. Internationally, India's adoption of electronic voting machines (EVMs) with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trails (VVPATs) since the 2010s has curtailed booth capturing—where criminals seized polling stations to stuff ballots—by enabling tamper-proof electronic recording verifiable via paper slips in 5% of machines per Supreme Court mandate.^[152] EVMs, introduced nationwide by 2004, reduced fraud in a system handling over 900 million voters, with VVPATs providing auditable trails that matched electronic tallies in trials, minimizing disputes and physical coercion.^[153] These reforms illustrate how technology, paired with verification, can secure large-scale elections against traditional manipulation tactics.^[152]

Debates on Access and Suppression

Prior to the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965, systemic barriers in Southern states severely limited Black voter participation, with registration rates among eligible Black adults in Mississippi standing at approximately 6.7% as of 1964.^[154] These mechanisms included poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation, which disenfranchised the vast majority of Black citizens despite the Fifteenth Amendment. The VRA's preclearance requirement under Section 5 mandated federal approval for voting changes in jurisdictions with histories of discrimination, leading to substantial increases in Black registration and turnout; by the 1960s' end, Southern Black voter registration had risen from under 30% to over 60%.^[155] The Supreme Court's 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder invalidated the coverage formula in Section 4(b), eliminating preclearance and prompting debates over renewed vulnerabilities to suppression, though nationwide Black turnout continued to grow, reaching 66% in the 2020 presidential election compared to 62% for whites.^[156]^[157] In contemporary discussions, proponents of expanded access argue that measures like same-day registration (SDR) remove logistical barriers, with studies estimating turnout increases of 5-10% overall and up to 2-17 percentage points higher among Black and Latino voters in SDR states relative to non-SDR states with similar demographics.^[158]^[159] Empirical analyses of SDR implementations, such as in Minnesota and Wisconsin, confirm these boosts particularly benefit infrequent and younger voters by accommodating procrastination or mobility.^[160] Conversely, critics of such expansions highlight administrative burdens and potential for errors, while advocates for voter ID laws contend they enhance integrity without significantly deterring participation; rigorous studies, including those examining over 2,000 races in states like Florida and Michigan, find no detectable turnout depression from strict ID requirements, even among minorities.^[161]^[162] In Georgia, following the 2008 ID law implementation, 2018 midterm data showed Black turnout at 47% versus 52% for whites, with gaps attributable more to mobilization differences than ID barriers, as provisional ballots due to ID issues affected less than 0.1% of votes.^[163] Debates also encompass citizenship verification amid rare but documented noncitizen voting incidents, which dilute citizen votes and fuel demands for proof-of-citizenship requirements. Federal law prohibits noncitizen voting in national elections, yet isolated cases persist; for instance, Michigan identified 15 potential noncitizen ballots in its 2024 general election out of over 5.7 million cast, while Oregon removed hundreds of noncitizens from rolls after erroneous registrations.^[164]^[165] Comprehensive reviews affirm such occurrences are minuscule—numbering in the dozens annually nationwide—and insufficient to sway outcomes, but they have spurred legislative pushes for federal proof mandates, with opponents viewing them as unnecessary hurdles despite evidence of negligible turnout effects from similar state-level verifications.^[166]^[167] These tensions reflect a causal trade-off: easing access risks integrity lapses, while safeguards impose minimal empirical costs on eligible voters, prioritizing empirical turnout data over anecdotal suppression claims.^[168]

Systemic Manipulation and Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering involves the deliberate drawing of electoral district boundaries to advantage one political party over another, often by concentrating (packing) an opposing party's supporters into a minimal number of districts where they win by large margins, or dispersing (cracking) them across multiple districts to dilute their influence in each.^[169]^[170] This practice entrenches incumbents and reduces electoral competition by creating safe seats, as evidenced by simulations demonstrating that packed districts waste opposition votes while cracked districts ensure narrow wins for the favored party across more seats.^[171] In the United States, where congressional districts are redrawn every decade after the census, partisan control of state legislatures enables such manipulations, leading to outcomes where a party's seat share exceeds its statewide vote share.^[172] A prominent metric for quantifying partisan gerrymandering is the efficiency gap, which calculates the difference in "wasted votes" between parties—defined as votes for losing candidates plus surplus votes beyond the winner's margin—divided by total votes cast.^[173]^[174] Positive or negative values indicate bias favoring one party; for instance, North Carolina's 2016 congressional map exhibited an efficiency gap exceeding thresholds courts have used to identify dilution, contributing to Republicans winning 10 of 13 seats despite receiving about 53% of the vote.^[175] In 2019, a North Carolina trial court invalidated the state's legislative maps as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, citing evidence that they systematically favored Republicans by packing Democratic voters into fewer districts and cracking others to secure slim majorities.^[176] The U.S. Supreme Court later dismissed federal challenges in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), ruling partisan gerrymandering nonjusticiable at the federal level, though state courts continue to intervene.^[177] Such districting practices correlate with diminished competition in U.S. House elections, where fewer than 10% of seats are typically rated as truly competitive (e.g., toss-ups or leaning races) in recent cycles, per analyses of polling and historical margins.^[178]^[179] Simulations of alternative neutral maps often yield 20-50% more competitive districts, highlighting how gerrymandering prioritizes partisan efficiency over responsiveness to voter shifts.^[172] Beyond districting, systemic manipulations include state-level variations in electoral rules that alter vote translation without altering boundaries, such as adjustments to early voting windows or ballot harvesting provisions. Ballot harvesting, the practice of third-party collection and submission of absentee ballots, is permitted in states like California but banned in others like Arizona, with empirical studies showing it boosts turnout among low-propensity voters by 2-5 percentage points in allowing jurisdictions. In the 2020 election, states expanding early and mail voting—often in response to the COVID-19 pandemic—saw turnout rise to 66.8%, the highest in over a century, though critics argue subsequent restrictions in Republican-controlled states (e.g., shorter drop-box deadlines) aimed to counteract perceived irregularities but risked differential impacts on urban and minority voters. These rule asymmetries enable incumbents to shape turnout composition, entrenching advantages where demographic correlations with partisanship exist, independent of fraud claims.

Compulsory Voting and Abstention Rights

Compulsory voting mandates that eligible citizens participate in elections, typically enforced through fines or other penalties for non-compliance, with the aim of boosting turnout and ensuring broader representation. Countries implementing this system include Australia, where it has been in place since 1924, and Belgium, which adopted it in 1893; both achieve voter turnout rates exceeding 85-90% in national elections, compared to voluntary systems like the United States, where turnout often hovers around 60-70%.^[42]^[180] In Australia, eligible voters face fines of up to AUD 20 for failing to vote without a valid excuse, while Belgium imposes escalating penalties starting at EUR 40-80, contributing to these elevated participation levels.^[181] Despite enforcement, compulsory systems allow for informal abstention through blank or invalid ballots, which serve as a form of protest without incurring full penalties. In Australia, informal votes—those not following preferential voting rules—typically range from 5-6% of total ballots cast, often reflecting dissatisfaction or deliberate rejection of options.^[182] Similarly, Belgium sees invalid or blank votes at around 3-5% in federal elections, enabling voters to comply minimally while signaling disengagement.^[42] These rates, comprising 5-10% in such systems, highlight a workaround for abstention, though they do not count toward electing candidates and may dilute the overall mandate's legitimacy. Critics argue that compulsory voting compels uninformed or apathetic individuals to participate, potentially degrading electoral quality without improving policy outcomes. Empirical analyses, such as those examining variations in compulsory regimes, find that while turnout rises by 7-10 percentage points, the influx of marginal voters—who are often less informed—does not shift election results or enhance representation of moderate preferences.^[183]^[184] Studies indicate these voters may cast random or low-information ballots, increasing noise in the aggregate signal rather than reflecting deliberate choice, as evidenced by no detectable gains in political knowledge or engagement beyond mere attendance.^[185] In contrast, voluntary systems like the U.S. allow apathy to self-select out low-stakes or uninformed participation, theoretically preserving a electorate weighted toward those with sufficient interest to inform themselves.^[186] From an ethical standpoint, the right to abstain counters compulsory voting's coercive nature, viewing non-participation as a rational response to inadequate information or trivial stakes, thereby avoiding coerced errors that undermine democratic legitimacy. Philosophers and analysts contend that mandating votes treats citizens as means to state ends, infringing on autonomy without empirical justification for superior outcomes, as abstention filters incompetence more effectively than penalties.^[187]^[188] Proponents of compulsion frame it as a civic duty to legitimize governance, yet evidence shows it reinforces state authority over individual judgment, with fines disproportionately burdening the disinterested without addressing root causes of disengagement.^[189] This tension underscores abstention not as dereliction but as a safeguard against aggregating uninformed preferences into policy.

Ethical and Philosophical Perspectives

Religious and Moral Views

In Christian theology, participation in civic affairs, including governance, aligns with the pursuit of the common good as articulated by Thomas Aquinas, who posited that just laws and political order direct society toward communal flourishing under natural law, obligating rational beings to contribute to righteous rule where possible.^[190]^[191] The Protestant Reformation further emphasized individual conscience over ecclesiastical or monarchical hierarchy, as exemplified by Martin Luther's 1521 declaration at the Diet of Worms rejecting papal authority unless convinced by Scripture and reason, framing political engagement—including voting—as a matter of personal accountability to God rather than blind obedience.^[192]^[193] Islamic doctrine incorporates shura, or mutual consultation, as a foundational principle of governance, referenced in the Quran (Surah Ash-Shura 42:38) and exemplified in the early caliphates, where the companions of Muhammad selected Abu Bakr as the first caliph in 632 CE through deliberative assembly rather than hereditary succession.^[194]^[195] Modern fatwas on democratic voting diverge: some scholars, such as Abdullah bin Bayyah, affirm compatibility between shura and electoral processes insofar as they promote justice and public interest without violating Sharia, while others, citing potential conflicts with divine sovereignty, deem participation in secular systems impermissible if they enable un-Islamic legislation.^[196]^[197] Empirical patterns reveal that religious adherence correlates with elevated voter turnout in contexts like the United States, where Christians, particularly evangelicals, participate at rates exceeding those of secular groups; for instance, post-2024 election analysis indicated Christians constituted 72% of voters despite comprising roughly 70% of the adult population, underscoring a civic duty informed by faith.^[198]^[199] This disparity persists across elections, with frequent religious service attenders demonstrating higher engagement than the religiously unaffiliated, attributing turnout to moral imperatives derived from doctrinal views on stewardship and communal order.^[200]

Duty to Vote vs. Informed Abstention

The expressivist perspective posits that voting serves primarily as a symbolic act of civic participation, expressing allegiance to shared values and fostering social cohesion, even when voters lack detailed policy knowledge or their individual ballot has negligible probabilistic impact on outcomes.^[201] This view frames non-voting as a failure of civic ritual, potentially eroding communal bonds, though it downplays the epistemic quality of votes in favor of their expressive function.^[201] Opposing this, an epistemic argument emphasizes abstention as a moral obligation for the uninformed, to avoid contributing incompetent judgments that distort collective decisions. Philosopher Jason Brennan articulates this in The Ethics of Voting (2011), asserting no positive duty to vote exists, but a negative duty prevails against casting "bad" votes—those based on ignorance, bias, or irrationality—which he likens to polluting the democratic process. Brennan extends this critique in Against Democracy (2016), citing pervasive voter incompetence as grounds for restricting participation to the knowledgeable, rather than mandating universal turnout.^[202] Supporting data from political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels in Democracy for Realists (2016) reveals that voter choices correlate more strongly with partisan group identities and retrospective sociotropic assessments than with accurate policy information or economic facts; for instance, analyses of U.S. election data show group loyalty overriding evidence of incumbent performance in 80-90% of cases across decades.^[203] As alternatives to mass uninformed voting, epistocracy—governance weighted toward the epistemically competent, via mechanisms like knowledge tests or enfranchisement lotteries favoring the informed—has been proposed by Brennan to enhance decision quality without abolishing popular input.^[202] Sortition, involving random selection of decision-makers from the citizenry, counters electoral incentives for demagoguery and voter manipulation by bypassing campaigns altogether, as explored in theoretical comparisons where it yields descriptively representative bodies less prone to elite capture.^[204] These models prioritize causal efficacy in governance over ritualistic equality, though implementation faces logistical and legitimacy challenges.^[205]

Information Asymmetries and Voter Competence

Voters frequently exhibit significant gaps in understanding basic economic principles, which underpin many policy decisions. A 2005 survey by the National Council on Economic Education revealed that a majority of high school students, and by extension the future electorate, failed to grasp core concepts such as incentives, trade-offs, and the benefits of international trade.^[206] Similarly, a contemporaneous analysis indicated that the typical American adult possessed insufficient knowledge of economics to navigate market systems effectively, with widespread misconceptions about fiscal responsibility and market dynamics.^[207] These deficiencies persist into adulthood, as evidenced by Pew Research findings from 2010 showing that while the public could identify broad political facts, specific economic indicators—like precise unemployment trends—eluded accurate estimation by large segments of the population.^[208] Such knowledge gaps manifest as systematic biases in voter preferences, particularly a proclivity toward policies favoring redistribution over market-oriented approaches. Economist Bryan Caplan documents four pervasive biases—antimarket, antiforeign, make-work, and pessimism—that lead voters to systematically undervalue the efficiency of free markets and overestimate government intervention's benefits, resulting in support for inefficient redistribution despite empirical evidence of incentive distortions and growth reductions.^[61] These biases diverge sharply from expert consensus, as seen in Initiative on Global Markets (IGM) panels where economists overwhelmingly affirm principles like comparative advantage and the harms of protectionism—views rejected by substantial public majorities in parallel surveys.^[209] For instance, public opinion polls consistently show less than 30% alignment with economists on foundational issues such as the net benefits of immigration or trade liberalization, fostering policies that prioritize short-term redistribution at the expense of long-term prosperity.^[210] These asymmetries contribute to electoral outcomes where identity overshadows policy comprehension, yielding unintended economic consequences. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, voter decisions were predominantly influenced by cultural values and national identity rather than detailed economic assessments, with studies linking Leave votes to perceptions of immigrant threats over informed evaluations of EU integration's fiscal impacts.^[211] Longitudinal analyses post-referendum have highlighted divergences from voter expectations, including persistent trade disruptions and slower growth not fully anticipated by participants prioritizing identity signals.^[212] Analogously, support for Donald Trump in 2016 correlated more strongly with social identity markers—such as racial resentment and authoritarian predispositions—than with granular policy knowledge, leading to implemented trade policies that imposed higher costs on supporters' demographics than projected.^[213] Addressing these issues prompts debate between enhancing voter competence through mandatory education and reconciling with the median voter theorem's implications. Proponents of education mandates argue that rigorous civic and economic curricula could elevate the median voter's information level, mitigating biases without altering democratic structures.^[214] Critics, however, contend that under the median voter theorem—where candidates converge on the uninformed median's preferences—such efforts merely entrench mediocrity, as aggregation of ignorant votes yields systematically suboptimal policies unless ignorance is treated as a structural flaw rather than remediable via schooling alone.^[215] Empirical tests of the theorem underscore that voter ignorance amplifies bias over random error, suggesting limited efficacy for education in overriding entrenched preferences.^[216]

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The social contract: consent of those governed - Oxford Academic
Sep 28, 2023 · Social contract theory's driving insight is that legitimate government requires the consent of those governed. Moreover, early social contract ...
[49]
The Place of Plural Voting in Mill's Conception of Representative ...
Jul 2, 2015 · I argue that Mill believes that plural voting should always accompany universal suffrage and thus that it should be in place indefinitely.
[50]
What Justifies Electoral Voice? J. S. Mill on Voting - Oxford Academic
Apr 12, 2024 · Abstract. Mill advocates plural voting on instrumentalist grounds: the more competent are to have more votes. At the same time, ...
[51]
JS MILL ON PLURAL VOTING, COMPETENCE - jstor
Abstract: J.S. Mill's plural voting proposal in Considerations on Representative. Government presents political theorists with a puzzle: the elitist ...
[52]
The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory
For representatives to be “democratic,” she argued, (a) they must be authorized to act; (b) they must act in a way that promotes the interests of the ...
[53]
[PDF] Satisfaction with Democracy and Voter Turnout
He can be reached at filip.kostelka@sciencespo.fr. André Blais is professor in the Department of Political Science and holds a Research. Chair in Electoral ...
[54]
[PDF] Satisfaction with Democracy and Voter Turnout
Lawrence Ezrow is a Professor of Government at the University of Essex, UK. His research interests include political representation and parties' election ...
[55]
Political Legitimacy - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Apr 29, 2010 · When a political authority fails to secure consent or oversteps the boundaries of the natural law, it ceases to be legitimate and, therefore, ...
[56]
National Turnout Rates 1789-Present - US Elections Project
National general election voting-eligible population turnout rates for presidential and midterm elections are plotted below, along with the raw data provided ...
[57]
2024 Presidential Election Voting and Registration Tables Now ...
Apr 30, 2025 · In the 2024 presidential election, 73.6% of the voting-age population was registered to vote and 65.3% voted according to new voting and ...
[58]
[PDF] WHAT IS THE PROBABILITY YOUR VOTE WILL MAKE A ...
Oct 24, 2008 · One of the motivations for voting is that one vote can make a difference. In a presidential election, the probability that your vote is ...
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https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1043463102014001003
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[PDF] Social Pressure and Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Large-Scale ...
Feb 1, 2008 · The authors are grateful to the Institution for Social and Policy. Studies at Yale University and to Practical Political Consulting, which.
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https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691138732/the-myth-of-the-rational-voter
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The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad ...
May 29, 2007 · The central idea is that voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational—and they vote accordingly ...
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[PDF] The Myth of the Rational Voter. By Bryan Caplan. Princeton
276 pp. Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter was originally titled “The logic of collective belief: the political economy of voter irrationality,” ...
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[PDF] Arrow's Impossibility Theorem - GMU
Mar 4, 2015 · Arrow's impossibility theorem says that the six axioms, 1) Universal Domain, 2) Completeness and Transitivity, 3) Positive Association, 4) ...
[65]
[PDF] Three Brief Proofs of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
Summary. Arrow's original proof of his impossibility theorem proceeded in two steps: showing the existence of a decisive voter, and then showing that a decisive.
[66]
[PDF] A Straightforward Proof of Arrow's Theorem - University of Rochester
Aug 18, 2014 · Here we give our proof of Arrow's Theorem: Arrow's Theorem If a social preference function satisfies Unanimity and IIA, then some indi- vidual ...Missing: explanation | Show results with:explanation
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[PDF] arrow's impossibility theorem of social choice - UChicago Math
There is no social-welfare function which fulfills Conditions 1-5 and produces a rational societal preference ordering.<|separator|>
[68]
An Empirical Example of the Condorcet Paradox of Voting in a Large ...
examples of such, and none in large electorates. This paper demonstrates the existence a real cyclical majority in a poll of Danish voters' preferred prime ...
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2000 Electoral College Results - National Archives
President George W. Bush [R] Main Opponent Albert Gore, Jr. [D] Electoral Vote Winner: 271 Main Opponent: 266* Total/Majority: 538/270 Vice President ...
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[PDF] Federal Elections 2000 - FEC
B. C. II. • Table: 2000 General Election Votes Cast for U.S. President, Senate and House 4.
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2016 Electoral College Results | National Archives
President Donald J. Trump [R] Main Opponent Hillary Clinton [D] Electoral Vote* Winner: 304 Main Opponent: 227 Total/Majority: 538/270 Vice President ...
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[PDF] FEDERAL ELECTIONS 2016 - FEC
Page 1. F ederal. Elections. Election Results for the. U.S. President, the. U.S. Senate and the. U.S. House of. Representatives. Election R esults for the U .S.
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2000 | The American Presidency Project
2000. Party, Nominees, Electoral Vote, Popular Vote. Presidential, Vice Presidential. Republican, election party winner, George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, 271 ...
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2016 | The American Presidency Project
0, --, 1,448,603, 1.1%. Last update: 12/16/2016 @ 22:15 GMT *Electoral vote totals are based on assumption of electors voting consistent with popular vote in ...
[75]
Public Choice - Econlib
Public choice reasoning thus predicts low rates of voter participation if voters are rational. Indeed, if there is an unsolved puzzle, it is not why turnout in ...
[76]
James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock on the Weaknesses of ...
The present paper examines Buchanan and Tullock's critique of majority voting and highlights the radical but overlooked contribution made by Tullock to the ...
[77]
[PDF] Logrolling in Congress - Center for Effective Lawmaking
May 9, 2023 · Abstract. We study vote trading among U.S. Congress members. By tracking roll-call votes within bills across five legislatures and ...
[78]
[PDF] Special Interest Groups Versus Voters and the Political Economics ...
Jun 9, 2023 · Having both of these measures is crucial, as it is far from clear that voting in line with special interests simultaneously means voting against ...
[79]
[PDF] Special interest groups versus voters and the political economics of ...
Apr 24, 2020 · We examine whether representatives are more likely to serve long-term campaign donors instead of constituents during times of low media ...
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Voter Ignorance and the Democratic Ideal by Ilya Somin :: SSRN
Jul 26, 2017 · An ignorant electorate cannot achieve true democratic control over public policy. The immense size and scope of modern government makes it virtually impossible ...Missing: studies | Show results with:studies
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Welfare states and majority rule - GIS Reports
Jan 9, 2025 · ... welfare benefits, creating challenges in balancing political majorities with fiscal responsibility. A young man holds up a demand written on ...
[82]
JAMES BUCHANAN, GORDON TULLOCK, AND THE “RADICALLY ...
Jun 14, 2022 · This paper traces the long arc of Buchanan and Tullock's opposition to the “one person, one vote” standard. The Calculus of Consent offers a ...
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What is the first-past-the-post voting system and how does it work?
Jul 1, 2024 · Voters put a cross against the name of their preferred candidate on their ballot paper. The candidate with the most votes - or the "first past ...
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[PDF] A Regression Discontinuity Test of Strategic Voting and Duverger's ...
The effects are stronger in close elections and cannot be explained by differences in the number of candidates, as well as their party affiliation and ...
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First Past the Post - Make Votes Matter
At the 2024 election, Labour netted a huge majority of seats in Parliament with just 34% of the vote. Overall they gained an extra 211 seats despite an increase ...
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Proportional Representation - Center for Effective Government
Mar 14, 2025 · Proportional Representation (PR): the creation of multi-member districts in which seats are allocated to parties in proportion to their vote.
[87]
Party List Proportional Representation - Electoral Reform Society
In Party List systems, seats in parliament closely match how many votes each party receives, but there is often a weaker constituency link.
[88]
PR Library: Common Criticisms of PR and Responses to Them
Probably the most common criticism of proportional representation is that as it increases the representativeness of government it also increases its instability ...
[89]
Local Voter Drop-Off - Knight Foundation
Turnout for local elections is even lower, with research showing only 1 in 5 eligible voters show up for mayoral elections.
[90]
Voting when the stakes are high - ScienceDirect.com
Most theories of voter behavior predict that electoral participation will be higher in elections where more is at stake.
[91]
Increasing Voter Turnout in Local Elections - National Civic League
The backdrop of the contentious 2020 Presidential election is a valuable opportunity to focus citizens on the importance and impact of their vote in local races ...
[92]
Does direct democracy increase communicative responsiveness? A ...
Mar 27, 2017 · Using a field experiment, this study examines whether direct democracy increases the responsiveness of Swiss state legislators to citizen- ...
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Swiss Direct Democracy - ACE Electoral Knowledge Network
The federal constitution introduced the principle of holding a mandatory referendum in order to change the constitution, as well as the popular initiative for a ...Missing: frequency policy elite capture
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How Swiss direct democracy works - SWI swissinfo.ch
Mar 31, 2025 · Many nations admire Switzerland's system of direct democracy. But what do direct democratic tools really entail?Missing: frequency responsiveness elite capture<|separator|>
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https://ballotpedia.org/History_of_initiative_and_referendum_in_the_U.S
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Proposition 13 and State Budget Limitations: Past Successes and ...
Jun 19, 2003 · Proposition 13 triggered one of the nation's largest state and local tax reductions by immediately cutting California property taxes by $5 billion.<|separator|>
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Cognitive ability and voting behaviour in the 2016 UK referendum ...
In this referendum, voter turnout was 72.2% of the electorate with 51.9% voting to Leave and 48.1% voting to Remain [1]. The issue of Brexit was very ...
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[PDF] An Import(ant) Price of Brexit Uncertainty
Our paper focuses on the price and welfare effects of policy uncertainty of the U.K.'s Brexit referendum in. 2016. We find evidence that import prices rise ...
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Robert's Rules of Order | The Official Website of Rober'ts Rules of ...
Robert's Rules of Order is America's foremost guide to parliamentary procedure. It is used by more professional associations, fraternal organizations, and ...Books · FAQs · Official Interpretations · Q&A ForumMissing: deliberative assemblies NGOs
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Voting Procedures and Voting ... - Robert's Rules of Order Online
In small assemblies the vote is often taken by "show of hands," or by "raising the right hand" as it is also called. The other methods of voting are by rising; ...Missing: 1876 NGOs
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Robert's Rules of Order for Voting - All You Need To Know - iBabs
Jul 16, 2021 · Voice vote or 'viva voce' is the most common (and customary) method for voting. The presiding officer or chairman simply asks the assembly “All ...Missing: deliberative NGOs
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How Unequal Shareholder Rights Influence Proxy Voting Outcomes ...
Feb 4, 2025 · This article explains how dual class share structures can distort key governance signals, limiting the influence of minority shareholders on ...Missing: battles activist
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The director's guide to shareholder activism
Jul 14, 2024 · Proxy fights. Shareholder activists may conclude that the best way to achieve their goals is to replace some or all of a company's board. In ...Missing: principle 2020s
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Shareholder Activism and ESG: What Comes Next, and How to ...
May 29, 2021 · This article provides background on the potential for increased integration of ESG in shareholder activism campaigns and offers practical guidance for ...Missing: share vote battles 2020s
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[PDF] Broadridge ProxyPulseTM - 2023 Proxy Season Review
Voting participation by retail shareholders inched up to 29.6% of the shares they hold from 29.4% last year. Broadridge ProxyPulse. Page 3. What to Expect in ...
[106]
[PDF] Retail Shareholder Participation in the Proxy Process - ECGI
Table 3 provides ballot-level statistics: retail voters cast ballots for 32% of shares owned, reflecting the decision of only 11% of accounts to participate, ...
[107]
Dear board: individual shareholders are vital - Broadridge | Next
Shareholder Voting As a group, retail investors voted 29.6% of the shares they owned in 2023 (up 0.1% from 2022). Voting participation by institutional ...
[108]
Voting in Early America - Colonial Williamsburg
Voice voting made ballot counts harder to rig and, cast in the presence of friends, neighbors, local officials, and candidates, left no doubt about a voter's ...<|separator|>
[109]
Back When Everyone Knew How You Voted
Or even stop you from voting at all? Today the secret ballot is assumed to be a fundamental part of democracy. But for most of America's ...
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19th Century voting was marked by bribery, violence and chaos ...
Oct 22, 2020 · Election Day in 19th-century America was a loud, raucous, often dangerous event. Political parties would offer food, drink and inducements ...
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Vote buying in nineteenth century US elections | Social Logic
Anecdotes about vote buying and electoral fraud, particularly in the mid to late nineteenth century, are an inescapable, and colorful, part of American ...
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Secret ballot introduced | National Museum of Australia
Oct 4, 2022 · Demands for electoral reform were a major political issue in Australia from the 1840s and increased in intensity with the arrival of large ...
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Why Do We Vote by Secret Ballot? - JSTOR Daily
Oct 23, 2020 · Election days used to be raucous affairs, with individual votes sometimes cast orally for all to hear.
[114]
Hand counts of votes may cause errors, says new Rice U. study
Feb 2, 2012 · “Post-Election Auditing: Effects of Election Procedure and Ballot Type on Manual Counting Accuracy, Efficiency and Auditor Satisfaction and ...
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Post-Election Audits | MIT Election Lab
Sep 4, 2024 · Post-election audits are critical for election security and voter confidence in contests large and small, national and local. Consequently, most ...Missing: rates studies
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Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) systems. - ACE
The increasing sophistication of computer technology towards the end of the 1990s led to the most recent development in the evolution of voting systems: ...<|separator|>
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[PDF] The Direct Recording Electronic Voting Machine (DRE) Controversy
Furthermore, paper ballots used with DREs (called voter-verified paper audit trails, or VVPAT) are largely unproven and it is not clear how well they can meet ...
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Overview of Software Security Issues in Direct-Recording Electronic ...
Aug 12, 2018 · PDF | This paper surveys the literature on software security in direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines. A history of DRE voting ...
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The Great Sarasota Undervote Mystery
May 3, 2007 · This happened in the Sarasota County part of Florida's 13th Congressional District (CD 13) race in the 2006 election. The 14.9% undervote (over ...
[120]
Results of GAO's Testing of Voting Systems Used in Sarasota ...
This is the accessible text file for GAO report number GAO-08-425T entitled 'Elections: Results of GAO's Testing of Voting Systems Used in Sarasota County ...
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Elections: Observations on Voting Equipment Use and Replacement
Apr 11, 2018 · What GAO Found Local election jurisdictions primarily used optical scan and direct recording electronic (DRE), also known as touch screen, ...
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[PDF] HELP AMERICA VOTE ACT OF 2002 - Congress.gov
Oct 29, 2002 · To establish a program to provide funds to States to replace punch card voting systems, to establish the Election Assistance Commission to ...<|separator|>
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[PDF] Evidence-Based Elections - Berkeley Statistics
Jan 9, 2012 · This can be accomplished with a combination of software-independent voting systems, compliance audits, and risk-limiting audits. Together, these ...
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[PDF] Election Auditing: Best Practices and New Areas for Research
The best-known type of election audit is the post-elec- tion tabulation audit that confirms the accuracy of electoral contests by ensuring that the votes were.
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Whitepapers - Voatz
Research & Whitepapers. Election Audits Via Blockchain. Published 2025. This paper explores how blockchain-backed remote ballot marking can enhance election ...Missing: critiques | Show results with:critiques
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Voatz smartphone voting app has significant security flaws, MIT ...
Feb 13, 2020 · A recent version of a voting app that has been used in limited capacity in federal elections has significant security flaws, a Massachusetts ...
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Going from bad to worse: from Internet voting to blockchain voting
Abstract. Voters are understandably concerned about election security. News reports of possible election interference by foreign powers, of unauthorized vo.Missing: critiques | Show results with:critiques
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The Myth of “Secure” Blockchain Voting | U.S. Vote Foundation
In this short paper, David Jefferson explains why blockchain cannot deliver the security guarantees required for safe online elections.
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Blockchain Voting: An imminent threat to democracy
It's time to quash the growing hype around blockchain voting systems and refocus election reform on technologies that are safer & more reliable.
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Voting by mail and absentee voting | MIT Election Lab
Feb 28, 2024 · Another question surrounding VBM is whether it increases voter fraud. Two major features of VBM raise these concerns. First, the ballot is cast ...
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Mail-in voting rates drop but early in-person voting is a hit : NPR
Jul 1, 2025 · Mail voting comprised 30.3% of the turnout for the 2024 election, which is a decrease compared to the 2020 election when mail ballots comprised 43% of turnout.
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Low rates of fraud in vote-by-mail states show the benefits outweigh ...
Jun 2, 2020 · Elaine Kamarck and Christine Stenglein write that a database of voter fraud convictions gathered by the Heritage Foundation shows that ...
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Does Voting by Mail Increase Fraud? Estimating the Change in ...
We find no evidence that voting by mail increases the risk of voter fraud overall. Between 2016 and 2019, RBM (VBM) states reported similar fraud rates to non- ...
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What Methods Did People Use to Vote in the 2020 Election?
Apr 29, 2021 · Many states maintained traditional voting procedures, but some expanded early voting, and others automatically sent all registered voters a ...
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A Deep Dive into Absentee Ballot Rejection in the 2020 General ...
Dec 16, 2021 · For this analysis, we define the absentee rejection rate as the total number of absentee ballots rejected out of the total absentee ballots ...State Level Absentee... · County Level Absentee... · Gauging Absentee Rejection...<|separator|>
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Audits of the 2020 American election show an accurate vote count
May 13, 2025 · We find that election audits shifted the net presidential vote count by only about 0.007%, with similarly minuscule errors across all major types of electoral ...Missing: incidents | Show results with:incidents
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How does vote-by-mail work and does it increase election fraud?
Jun 22, 2020 · There is no evidence that mail ballots increase electoral fraud. Several anti-fraud protections are built into the process. Those who abuse mail ...
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COVID-19 proceedings: voting - UK Parliament
On 3 November 2020, the House further extended proxy voting to any MP that didn't wish to vote in person for medical or public health reasons realting to the ...Missing: rules | Show results with:rules
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The UK parliament and coronavirus | Institute for Government
Mar 18, 2020 · Eventually, on 10 June, the proxy voting system was expanded to include MPs unable to attend the House for medical or public health reasons.
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CHOOSING REPRESENTATIVES BY PROXY VOTING
This Essay argues that permitting individuals to delegate their votes might significantly advance many of the core values at the heart of election law.
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Internet voting in Estonia 2005–2019: Evidence from eleven elections
Over the course of the past 15 years, Estonian voters have cast i-votes in four national and three European Parliament elections, in addition to four nation- ...
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[PDF] The Application of I-voting for Estonian Parliamentary Elections of ...
Abstract. Estonia has implemented internet voting as a method to participate in various types of elections since 2005. In Riigikogu (parliament) Elections ...
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[PDF] Security Analysis of the Estonian Internet Voting System
Several countries have experimented with casting votes over the Internet, but today, no nation uses Internet voting for binding political elections to a larger ...
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[PDF] SECURITY ANALYSIS OF ESTONIAN I-VOTING SYSTEM USING ...
The thesis concentrates on large-scale attacks. The work shows that based on the assigned parameter values by the author, the Estonian I- voting scheme is ...
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Understanding the Evidence on Voting by Mail
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American Confidence in Elections: Preventing Noncitizen Voting ...
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Georgia hand tally of votes is complete, affirms Biden lead | AP News
A hand tally of ballots cast in Georgia for the presidential race has been completed, and it affirms Democrat Joe Biden's ...
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Georgia reaffirms Biden's victory for 3rd time after recount, dealing ...
Dec 7, 2020 · Georgia recertified its presidential election results on Monday, again finding Joe Biden as the winner following three counts of ballots, ...
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Voter ID Laws - National Conference of State Legislatures
Thirty-six states have laws requesting or requiring voters to show some form of identification at the polls.
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Eight in 10 Americans Favor Early Voting, Photo ID Laws
Oct 14, 2022 · Gallup polling shows majority support for election-law policies that make voting easier and opposition to those that make voting harder ...
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Americans Endorse Both Early Voting and Voter Verification
Oct 24, 2024 · Majorities of Americans favor election law policies that expand voters' access to the ballot box and limit election fraud.
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How electronic voting machines have improved India's democracy
Dec 6, 2019 · Drawing on her research, Shamika Ravi describes how electronic voting machines can improve the integrity of elections in large democracies ...
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FAQs on EVM | Election Commission of India
In what way functioning of EVMs is different from the conventional system of voting through paper ballots? Whether technical knowledge is required for casting ...Missing: impact | Show results with:impact
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Voting Rights and Political Representation in the Mississippi Delta
Black voter registration, particularly in the South, was very low, and in Mississippi only 6.7 percent of eligible blacks were registered to vote in 1964.[14] ...
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How Shelby County v. Holder Broke Democracy - Legal Defense Fund
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 with federal preclearance is signed into law. 1965-2013: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) prohibited racial discrimination ...
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Shelby County v. Holder - Oyez
The Court held that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act imposes current burdens that are no longer responsive to the current conditions in the voting districts ...
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Growing Racial Disparities in Voter Turnout, 2008–2022
or the difference in the turnout rate between white and nonwhite voters — is a key way of measuring participation ...
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New Study Finds That States with Same Day Voter Registration ...
Jun 29, 2021 · Black and Latinx turnout is between 2-17 percentage points higher in states with SDR compared to similar states without it.
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Same Day Registration Increases Turnout of Young Voters
Studies find that same day registration (SDR) laws increase turnout, but less is known about which kinds of voters are most affected.
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Same-day registration - MIT Election Lab
Feb 9, 2022 · Today, voters in all states except for North Dakota must register as a voter before they can cast their ballot in an election.
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[PDF] Strict Voter Identification Laws, Turnout, and Election Outcomes
We do so using historical data on more than 2,000 races in Florida and Michigan, which both allow and track ballots cast without identification. Results ...<|separator|>
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Voter ID Laws Don't Depress Turnout - Honest Elections Project
Feb 4, 2020 · It isn't to prevent lawful conduct; it's to help stop illegal activity. Voter identification requirements are no different, and that's why ...
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Accurate Data from Georgia Shows Racial Turnout Gap
Aug 7, 2023 · Multiple datasets and analyses confirm the growing disparity between white and nonwhite voter participation in the state.
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Michigan finds 15 noncitizens may have voted in 2024 election amid ...
Apr 3, 2025 · Though the 15 potential noncitizen voters represent a tiny fraction of the more than 5.7 million ballots cast in the 2024 general election, ...Missing: incidents | Show results with:incidents
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Local elections officials are removing noncitizens from Oregon voter ...
Sep 16, 2024 · County election officials around Oregon said Monday they'd removed non-US citizens from their voter rolls, after revelations last week that the state had ...
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6 facts about false noncitizen voting claims and the election - NPR
Oct 12, 2024 · There are severe penalties for noncitizens who illegally try to vote · Available data shows noncitizen voting is incredibly rare · Flawed studies ...
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Explainer: Noncitizen Voting in U.S. Elections | migrationpolicy.org
Explainer: Noncitizen Voting in U.S. Elections ... It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal or state elections in the United States. There is no evidence ...
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Voter Identification Laws and Turnout in the United States
This article analyzes voter identification laws in the United States and their effects on voter turnout. Theoretically, there are plausible reasons to ...
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[PDF] NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES PACK-CRACK-PACK
This paper studies the manipulation of electoral maps by political parties, known as gerrymandering. At the core of our analysis is the recognition that ...
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Info | Gerrymandering Project
The goal of partisan gerrymandering is to amplify a political party's power beyond what it deserves based on their vote share alone.<|control11|><|separator|>
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Simulated Packing and Cracking | Election Law Journal
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Gerrymandering Competitive Districts to Near Extinction
Aug 11, 2022 · ... reduce competition. Though the number of competitive congressional districts in the current House was already small, this redistricting ...
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Partisan Gerrymandering and the Efficiency Gap - Harvard Law School
We introduce a new measure of partisan symmetry: the efficiency gap. It represents the difference between the parties' respective wasted votes in an election.
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[PDF] Partisan Gerrymandering and the Efficiency Gap - Chicago Unbound
relative wasted votes. See Eric McGhee, Measuring Partisan Bias in Single-Member District Electoral Systems,. 39 LEGIS. STUD. Q. 55, 68 (2014) ...
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[PDF] How the Efficiency Gap Works - Brennan Center for Justice
The efficiency gap is a standard for measuring partisan gerrymandering that is currently at the heart of the Wisconsin gerrymandering case, Whitford v.
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North Carolina's Legislative Maps Are Thrown Out by State Court ...
Sep 3, 2019 · A three-judge panel in Raleigh threw out North Carolina's state legislative maps as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander and ordered new ...
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Rucho v. Common Cause | Supreme Court Bulletin - Law.Cornell.Edu
Whether plaintiffs' partisan gerrymandering claims are justiciable. Whether North Carolina's 2016 congressional map is, in fact, an unconstitutional partisan ...<|separator|>
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For decades, most U.S. House seats have mainly been won by the ...
Oct 30, 2024 · The Republican Party currently has control of the U.S. House of Representatives, but it has an exceptionally narrow majority – 220 seats ...
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18 Months from Election Day 2026, 81% of House seats are already ...
Apr 28, 2025 · 2 new reports capture lack of competition in congressional elections & need for election reform. States ranked on competition & voter voice ...
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Compulsory voting in Australia - Australian Electoral Commission
Nov 20, 2023 · As voting is compulsory, electors are given a number of ways to cast their vote at an election, including postal voting, pre-poll voting, absent voting.
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[PDF] Compulsory voting around the world - Electoral Commission
Although compulsory voting has never been part of the UK electoral system, mandatory participation in elections is a feature in a diverse range of countries ...
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https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1475-4932.12877
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Forcing People to Vote Doesn't Change the Outcome - Chicago Booth
The exact increase varied based on the type of election: 7 percent in parliamentary elections, 8 percent in state races, and 9 percent in presidential ballots.
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Compulsory voting and political participation: Empirical evidence ...
Some Austrian states temporarily introduced compulsory voting (CV). · CV increases voter turnout by 3.5 percentage points in national elections. · But CV has no ...Missing: adoption | Show results with:adoption
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Can compulsory voting reduce information acquisition?
In that case, the share of random votes increases with the participation of uninformed voters until, eventually, “the election outcome itself will not be more ...
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[PDF] THE CASE AGAINST COMPULSORY VOTING - Fraser Institute
CANADIAN STUDENT REVIEW SUMMER 2016. 29. THE CASE AGAINST. COMPULSORY VOTING: WHY. CONSCRIPT THE UNINFORMED? William Watson. To read posts on other interesting ...
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[PDF] Democratic Choice, Legitimacy and the Case Against Compulsory ...
Feb 13, 2022 · These arguments rest an enormous weight on high levels of voting at elections, and overlook the fact that if enough people vote for the ...
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Mandatory Voting Is a Bad and Unconstitutional Idea - Cato Institute
Jun 17, 2022 · A handful of countries, most notably Australia, impose mandatory voting, with citizens facing fines and punishments if they don't appear at the ...
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The Paradox of Compulsory Voting
Participation Does Not Equal Political Knowledge · Voter turnout has been in decline in Canada since the late 1980s. · While any drop in turnout is cause for ...
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Question 90. The essence of law - Summa Theologiae - New Advent
I answer that, A law, properly speaking, regards first and foremost the order to the common good. Now to order anything to the common good, belongs either to ...<|separator|>
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St. Thomas Aquinas and the Fittingness of the Democratic Order
Jan 28, 2022 · At the core of Aquinas's approach was a notion of the natural “common good” of society. We act together in political life for reasons that ...
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The Reformation, the conscience, election day - The Pathway
Nov 2, 2016 · “Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason, I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicted ...Missing: Protestant views political
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The Protestant Reformation and Freedom of Conscience
The Protestant Reformation was a major changing point to what we have today as freedom of conscience, a freedom as basic as one can get in a classic liberal ...
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Shura in Islam - إسلام ويب
Sep 4, 2002 · Al-Shura (Mutual consultation) is a pillar of ruling and governing in Islam. So, all decisions that are made by the state should be through Shura.
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[PDF] The Concept of Shura in Islamic Governance Practice of Shura ...
The practice of shura during the reign of the caliphate of Umar bin Khattab became the forerunner to the institutional implementation of the concept of shura in ...
[196]
Shura (Consultation) and Democracy | Bin Bayyah
Feb 5, 2012 · Shura meets with democracy in the point of looking for a peaceful solution. The system ofshura pours into one stream, which is Islamic justice ...
[197]
[PDF] yber - Islamic Shura, Democracy, and Online Fatwas - CyberOrient
Abstract: Publications on the Islamic shura concept – Arabic and English – usually include a com- parison with present-day liberal democracy.
[198]
Decisive Christian Vote Carries Trump to Historic Victory, Post ...
Nov 14, 2024 · New post-election research shows that Christian support was crucial in Donald Trump's 2024 landslide victory, showing that Christians made up 72% of the ...
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Christian Voters Will Play an Outsized Role in the US Election
Sep 17, 2024 · In the U.S., Christians tend to vote, and they tend to vote Republican. Michael Emerson explores the links between religion, race, ...
[200]
Divining Elections: Religious Citizens' Political Projections and ...
Mar 25, 2024 · Religious voters tend to have more positive affective forecasts about their projected election outcomes, consequently resulting in increased voter turnout.
[201]
The Ethics and Rationality of Voting
Jul 28, 2016 · 2.1 A General Moral Obligation Not to Vote? 3. Moral Obligations Regarding How One Votes. 3.1 The Expressivist Ethics of Voting; 3.2 The ...
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https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691178493/against-democracy
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https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169446/democracy-for-realists
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The Paradox of Democratic Selection: Is Sortition Better than Voting?
Jan 6, 2016 · Modern systems of political representation are based on the aristocratic idea of 'government by the best', who are to be selected through a ...
[205]
https://brill.com/view/journals/dyp/56/2/article-p136_003.xml
[206]
Why Americans flunk economics — and why it matters
Aug 11, 2025 · A 2005 survey by the National Council on Economic Education found a majority of high school students do not understand basic concepts in ...
[207]
Survey Finds Many Have Poor Grasp of Basic Economics
Apr 27, 2005 · A survey released yesterday suggested that the typical American does not know enough about economics to prosper in such a system.
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Public Knows Basic Facts about Politics, Economics, But Struggles ...
Nov 18, 2010 · As in recent knowledge surveys, about half (53%) estimate the current unemployment rate at about 10%. But the public continues to struggle ...
[209]
US Economic Experts Panel - Clark Center Forum
The Clark Center for Global Markets explores economists' views on vital policy issues via our US and European Economic Experts Panels.
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[PDF] Systematically Biased Beliefs about Political Influence
But if vot- ers' understanding of which officials are responsible for which outcomes is systematically biased, retrospective voting becomes an independent ...
[211]
Brexit driven by cultural values and national identity more than ...
Feb 16, 2021 · Brexit was not driven by social class but by cultural values and national identity, according to new research by UCL Institute of Education (IOE) and Stockholm ...
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Misinformedness about the European Union and the Preference to ...
This study assesses the role of EU knowledge in shaping the preference to vote to leave or remain in a (hypothetical) referendum on EU membership.
[213]
Pettigrew: Social Psychological Perspectives on Trump Supporters
Research on the topic demonstrates that these theories and concepts of social psychology prove centrally important in helping to understand this unexpected ...Missing: unintended outcomes
[214]
Public Understanding of Economics and Economic Statistics - ESCoE
Nov 25, 2020 · Few studies go beyond the headline survey finding that the public lack a basic understanding of economic issues, and few initiatives are ...
[215]
[PDF] Economics of Politics I. The Median Voter Theorem A
Bryan Caplan bcaplan@gmu.edu http://www.bcaplan.com. Econ 812. Week 14: Economics of Politics. I. The Median Voter Theorem. A. Assume that voters' preferences ...
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[PDF] On the Limits and Weaknesses of the Median Voter Model
There are two notions of “rational ignorance.” a. One assumes that rationally ignorant persons simply have relatively small samples but the data points are more ...