Invalid votes under compulsory voting: Poverty and runoff voting in Peruvian municipalities

Research on invalid voting has expanded over the past few years. Scholars largely agree on the most important determinants of invalid voting, foremost compulsory voting, quality of democracy, and ballot structure. However, disagreement prevails concerning several factors; more exactly, whether the effect is positive or negative. We examine determinants of invalid voting in the four most recent local elections in a single country, Sweden, all municipalities included. Applying a subnational research design allows us to control for several determinants that have been reported to be of significance in explaining varying levels of invalid voting, and, consequently, to examine factors with theoretically contradictory directions of effects. Two theoretical models of invalid voting are tested, an institutional and a societal model, each consisting of four variables. The latter explains considerably more of the variation in the dependent variable than the former. The most important determinant is education: higher levels of education among the population decrease the share of invalid votes. Concerning the institutional model, only district magnitude significantly affects the dependent variable, indicating that larger district magnitude depresses invalid voting. However, the effect disappears when societal variables are included, due to higher levels of education among the population in municipalities with high district magnitudes. Proportion of the electorate born abroad also significantly affects levels of invalid voting; higher proportions decrease invalid voting. We suggest that this is a consequence of political sophistication, interest, and being politically informed combined with who decides to vote and who decides to abstain amongst immigrants.

How do large-magnitude proportional systems affect invalid voting? We evaluate a Chilean electoral system reform that introduced proportionality. Voting is voluntary, and legislative and presidential elections are held concurrently. We compare the invalid votes between different types of elections before and after the reform using various difference-in-differences strategies. We find that invalid voting increased in legislative compared to presidential elections (pre-trends were parallel). The increase in invalid voting is greater in post-reform districts with higher magnitude and is not due to pre-reform district characteristics. The results of heterogeneity analyses and a survey experiment suggest the mechanism behind these findings is the cognitive burden associated with a longer ballot. This research highlights an understudied aspect of electoral systems: higher district magnitudes may be demobilizing in terms of valid voting for citizens who are more vulnerable to cognitive burden, even among those motivated enough to vote in the first-order election.

Belgium’s electoral system is idiosyncratic in many ways but one of its defining characteristics is its reliance on compulsory voting (CV). This chapter discusses the historical conditions and party-strategic considerations that have led to the adoption and endurance of CV, as well as the arguments in favor of or against CV. It explains the historical roots of CV in Belgium, before turning to current debates on CV. The chapter puts Belgium in a comparative perspective and determines whether CV actually leads to high levels of voter turnout, and describes the consequences of CV on individuals’ voting behavior, on voter equality, and on party political strength. CV has been a favorite subject of normative debates on how to improve democracy. The paradox of abolishing CV would thus be that everyone would be given the equal right and liberty to cast their vote but only the politically advantaged would take up that right.

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

One way to build secure electronic voting systems is to use Mix-Nets, which break any correlation between voters and their votes. One of the characteristics of Mix-Net-based eVoting is that ballots are usually decrypted individually and, as a consequence, invalid votes can be detected during the tallying of the election. In particular, this means that the ballot does not need to contain a proof of the vote being valid. However, allowing for invalid votes to be detected only during the tallying of the election can have bad consequences on the reputation of the election. First, casting a ballot for an invalid vote might be considered as an attack against the eVoting system by non-technical people, who might expect that the system does not accept such ballots. Besides, it would be impossible to track the attacker due to the anonymity provided by the Mix-Net. Second, if a ballot for an invalid vote is produced by a software bug, it might be only detected after the election period has finished. In particular, voters would not be able to cast a valid vote again. In this work we formalize the concept of having a system that detects invalid votes during the election period. In addition, we give a general construction of an eVoting system satisfying such property and an efficient concrete instantiation based on well-studied assumptions.

This article related to the use of signs and symbols as a protest vote beyond the invalid votes of the presidential election 2014 in Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta (DIY). This paper will interpret the hidden messages conveyed by voters through a ballot. This article contributes to solve two problems at once, the conceptual and practical. Conceptually, there is a gap in the study of protest voting. Protest voting describes that voting as not only used to support candidates or parties but can be used as a form of protest. However, in this paper the protest was not conveyed through voting but using signs, symbols, or messages in ballot. Practically, there are problems in the electoral system on viewing people votes. The current electoral system generalizes the approach on viewing invalid votes. Whereas, there some hidden messages of people votes and the essence of the election itself beyond the invalid ballot papers. This paper shows that these messages can not be accommodated by the current electoral system. Those include an indication of post-election money politics, expressions of blissful voters delivered on the ballot, the expletives and insults expressed by voters, a rejection of the candidates, and also a rejection for the current electoral system.

As voter turnout is steadily declining in western democracies, various authors have expressed concern about the stratification in electoral participation that this trend might entail. Some research suggests that specific categories of potential voters refrain from voting, leading to the electoral dominance of more privileged groups within the population. In this article, we investigate whether systems of compulsory voting are associated with more equal participation in elections. We study 36 countries that participated in the 2004 International Social Survey Programme. The analysis shows that compulsory voting is associated with higher turnout rates, but we do not observe any significant differences in electoral participation based on gender or educational level. However, we find a significant interaction effect between age and compulsory voting, suggesting that young age cohorts are unlikely to be affected by the dynamics of the civic duty argument that is inherent in systems of compulsory voting.

The issue of unequal electoral turnout poses serious concerns for both the overall health of democratic politics, and the extent to which certain groups exert an unequal influence on the political process. This article explores the relationship between electoral rules such as: compulsory voting, electoral system proportionality, and voter registration with voter inequality in terms of age, income and education. This is examined using cross-national survey data and cross-level interactions between electoral institutions and socio-demographic variables. The final dataset is based on waves 2–4 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, and contains information on 133,000 individuals, within 45 countries, between 2001 and 2016. The results indicate that compulsory voting is associated with a significant reduction in turnout inequalities, while the effects of proportionality and voter registration are somewhat more mixed.

In political science literature, it is often argued that compulsory voting can serve as a remedy against turnout inequality and thereby contribute to more egalitarian societies. However, the literature neglects differences between compulsory voting systems, and most studies consider the obligation to vote as a dichotomous variable. As a result, relatively little is known about the causal effects of particular stimuli and features of compulsory voting. By exploiting quasi-experimental conditions from direct-democratic decision-making in Switzerland, this research assesses the degree to which abstention fines account for a citizen’s willingness to vote under a compulsory voting context. The findings reveal that a marginal increase in monetary sanctions for voter-abstention leads temporally to a sizeable increase in turnout. However, it does not necessarily contribute to the expression of preferences by those traditionally underrepresented in direct-democratic decision-making since a third of those motivated to vote by the threat of a heavier fine will cast an empty or invalid ballot. The effect on turnout is further found to be moderated by income.

Soy occupies the largest area of agricultural land in Brazil, spreading from southern states to the Amazon region. Soy is also the most important agricultural commodity among Brazilian exports affecting food security and land use nationally and internationally. Here we pose the question of whether soy expansion affects only economic growth or whether it also boosts socioeconomic development, fostering education and health improvements in Brazilian municipalities where it is planted. To achieve this objective, we divided more than 5000 municipalities into two groups: those with >300 ha of soy (soy municipalities) and those with <300 ha of soy (non-soy municipalities). We compared the Human Development Index (HDI) and the Gini coefficient for income for these two groups of municipalities in 1991, 2000, and 2010. We made such comparison at the municipality level for the whole country, but we also grouped the municipalities by major geographical regions and states. We found that the HDI was higher in soy municipalities, especially in the agricultural frontier. That effect was not so clear in more consolidated agricultural regions of the country. Soy municipalities also had a higher Gini coefficient for income than non-soy municipalities. We concluded that soy could be considered a precursor of socioeconomic development under certain conditions; however, it also tends to be associated with an increase in income inequality, especially in the agricultural frontier.

Monetary Incentives to Vote: Evidence From a Nationwide Policy

Election Security: Technology, Risks, and Mitigations

This study aims to explain how factors, such as social and religious status, candidate figures, party identity, social and conventional media interactions, issue and program orientation, support of influential figures, and funds affect voter behavior in the 2019 Presidential and Vice Presidential Elections, to be precise in Ibun District. The study of voting behavior was developed because party identification or party loyalty did not have a strong influence, while what happened was that there were social divisions that had strong ties to voter behavior. An interesting phenomenon occurred in Ibun Subdistrict since there was a significant change in the number of voters in the 2014 presidential election where Prabowo received more votes than Jokowi, while in 2019, Jokowi received more votes than Prabowo. The research method in this research was explanatory quantitative research methods by collecting data from the results of questionnaires and documentation. The structural equation model (SEM) analysis method was also carried out to determine the effect of the dependent variable on the independent variable. Based on the findings obtained from this research, the researcher found that four variables greatly influenced the electability of candidates, namely media, the intensity of volunteer visits, religion, and role models. Psychological, sociological, and rational factors map voter behavior so that this can be applied in Ibun Subdistrict. The psychological aspects are represented by the media and role models; the sociological aspect represented by religion, while the rational aspect is represented by the figure of the candidate. Therefore, to increase the electability of candidates, they should imoprove positive image in the media, the intensity of volunteer visits, social piety from religious factors, and relationships with local community leaders.

Patronage and ideology in electoral behavior: Evidence from Egypt's first presidential elections

For more than 40 years, studies trying to explain macro-level electoral turnout have been one of the pillars of political behavioural research. From January 2004 to December 2013 alone, more than 130 articles were published in peer-reviewed journals using turnout at the national, regional or local level as the dependent variable. This meta-analysis tries to synthesize the results of these studies. I find there is a strong consensus in the literature that turnout is higher under compulsory voting, if the election is important, and if it is held in a small country. I also find that the influence of most other predictor variables, including the type of electoral system, the number of parties, development, income inequalities and electoral closeness is inconclusive at best. These results hint at the fact that the determinants of turnout might be more complex than the current theory suggests and is rather more context dependent.