Special Voting Arrangements

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that the traditional “booth, ballot, and pen” model of voting, based on a specific location and physical presence, may not be feasible during a health crisis. This situation has highlighted the need to assess whether existing national electoral legislation includes enough instruments to ensure citizens’ safety during voting procedures, even under the conditions of a global pandemic. Such instruments, often grouped under the umbrella of voter facilitation or convenience voting, range from voting in advance and various forms of absentee voting (postal, online, and proxy voting) to assisted voting and voting at home and in hospitals and other healthcare institutions. While most democracies have implemented at least some form of voter facilitation, substantial cross-country differences still exist. In the push to develop pandemic-sustainable elections in different institutional and political contexts, variation in voter facilitation makes it possible to learn from country-specific experiences. As accessibility and inclusiveness are critical components of elections for ensuring political legitimacy and accountability these lessons are of utmost importance.In this study, we focus on Finland, where the Parliament decided in March 2021 to postpone for two months the municipal elections that were originally scheduled to be held on April 18. Although the decision was mostly justified by the sudden and dramatic daily increase in new COVID-19 infections, the inability to guarantee the opportunity to vote for those in quarantine was included among the likely risks. The failure to organize health-safe voting procedures to accommodate the original schedule emphasizes a certain paradox in the Finnish electoral legislation: caution in introducing new facilitation instruments has led to lower levels of preparedness and flexibility in crisis situations. Although a forerunner in implementing extensive advance voting opportunities, Finland has only recently introduced postal voting, which is restricted to voters living abroad. Hence, we ask: what can be learned from this form of convenience voting if expanded to all voters to enhance the sustainability of elections?Our analyses are based on a survey conducted among non-resident voters (n= 2,100) after the 2019 parliamentary elections in which postal voting from abroad was allowed for the first time. Our results show that whereas trust in the integrity of postal voting is quite high, various efforts needed from individual voters substantially increase the costs of postal voting. Postal operations also raise concerns. Furthermore, voters felt that requiring two witnesses made postal voting cumbersome, an issue that needs to be resolved, particularly if applying postal voting in the context of a pandemic. The Finnish case constitutes a concrete example of a situation in which voter facilitation targeted to a particular segment of society may become a testbed for electoral engineering that will improve voting opportunities for everyone.

Early Voting in Florida

ABSTRACTPolling stations are at the fulcrum of the democratic process. They are the location where most voters exercise their democratic rights, but also one place where electoral fraud and irregularities may occur, both in consolidating and established democracies. This study provides a detailed analysis of the nature and frequency of electoral irregularities that are found in English local elections using original surveys of poll workers in 2018 and 2019 (n = 5659). It also identifies the effects of recent attempts to improve electoral integrity through the introduction of voter identification requirements on a pilot basis. Elections are found to be broadly well run but problems are reported with names missing from the electoral register and polling station accessibility requirements. Some more infrequent problems were reported with inappropriate behaviour from party agents/candidate – and some gender-based intimidation amongst voters. Attempted impersonation was exceptionally rare, however, and measures to introduce voter identification requirements therefore had little effect on the security of the electoral process. In fact, they led to some voters not casting their ballot, either for reasons of convenience and availability of suitable forms of ID, or reasons of principle and protest. There are therefore important implications for the wider literature on electoral integrity and the design of democratic practices.

The proportion of voters casting their votes by mail days or even weeks before election day has risen from initially five per cent to nearly thirty per cent in the 2017 German federal election. At the same time, the differences in election results between postal and election day voters are increasing, reaching a record at the Bundestag election in 2017. Against this background, it seems particularly surprising that there are only a small number of empirical studies on postal voting in Germany. For an evaluation (of the development) of postal voting, it is crucial to investigate the factors responsible for the different election results between the two voter groups. This requires more precise knowledge of postal voters and how they differ from voters who cast their ballots on election day. Using data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), we investigate in how far composition effects – differences between the voter types in the composition of factors potentially relevant for party choice – and association effects – differences regarding their vote functions or criteria applied for vote choice – can help to explain the different electoral outcomes. We conclude that the voter types do not differ substantially from each other with regards to their decision criteria but that their composition differs with regards to certain characteristics relevant for party choice.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)November 17, 2012 was national election day in the West African country of Sierra Leone. My friend Musa and I walked down Lunsar Road, a main thoroughfare in the provincial capital of Makeni, speaking in hushed tones so that our conversation would not echo in the desolate streets. The normally bustling neighborhoods were silent and deserted. Stores were shuttered, the sidewalk was empty of its usual crowd of traders and children, and the road itself hosted only the occasional official election vehicle, speeding from one polling station to the next. The stillness was broken only by the occasional residents ambling along in twos and threes, wearing their biometric voter ID cards on red lanyards around their necks, the telltale sign of India ink-marking that they had voted-on their right index fingers. The new laws governing public conduct on election day banned commerce, organized public activity, and vehicle travel until the polling stations closed at 7 p.m. And so the voters, many of whom had been queuing at their respective stations since five in the morning, walked home in the silence, and waited.The overwhelming stillness and my concomitant sense of unease were interrupted briefly by a call of, Musa! How are you? from a woman walking across the street. Musa and his friend met in the middle of the empty road and greeted each other. She was making her way home from voting, and was beaming. She was not unsettled by the stark surroundings; in fact she reveled in them, remarking on how wonderful, how amazing the town looked. As they chatted, Musa and his friend smiled and laughed, gesturing intermittently to an empty trading stall or to a silent workshop. They congratulated one another on keeping the peace, both anticipating that, as a result of people upholding the drastic curtailment of everyday freedoms, the elections would be pronounced free and fair, with minimal grumbling about tampering or irregularities from the losing parties. Musa's friend noted that she was glad that visitors (gesturing to me) were here to see their in action. She hoped I was pleased.The exceptional nature of this ostensibly productive, successful democratic moment invites many questions about what normative looks like. As the 2012 elections were Sierra Leone's first self-organized election since the 1980s, they were considered a huge test of the country's (Doyle 2012). The civil war had ended in 2002, and in the intervening decade, the United Nations had organized or run every election. To create a perfect election, in the words of several citizens, parliament passed comprehensive election laws that imposed restrictive new limits on assembly, free speech, and movement. The new laws created designated campaign days, increased oversight for party registration and activity, and banned political speech, dress, and activity during polling, a day in which commercial activity in urban areas was also forbidden. The curtailments of everyday freedoms were roundly criticized by international election observers as inconsistent with the core tenets of and human rights (Carter Center 2012a, European Union 2012). However, every foreign observer mission declared the election free, fair, and transparent, noting that the country was consolidating its democracy (European Union 2012:7). Sierra Leoneans were also satisfied, as the election was legitimized by the international community, and also conformed with local historical emphases on public shows of unity. The ugly side of political negotiations were dissimulated into covert spheres (Ferme 1999), which was considered the proper place for potentially divisive arguing, even as Sierra Leoneans deem these practices conducive to corruption precisely because of their opacity (see Richards 1996: 19).Sierra Leonean lawmakers invited international observer missions precisely because these missions have the power to adjudicate the quality of a nation's election and, by extension, its democracy. …

Chapter 3 discusses the “access versus integrity” framing of debates about registration and balloting procedures, particularly as it has developed in the United States. It identifies several areas where the choice of voting procedures does present a trade-off between these values: the secret ballot, the rules for changing voters’ place of residence on the electoral rolls, mail and absentee voting, mobile polling places, voter identification requirements, and internet voting. But the study also identifies several areas where both inclusion and security may be enhanced: automatic voter registration, Election Day registration, online and automated voter registration, posting provisional voter rolls prior to Election Day, early (in-person) voting, and decentralized polling places. Thus the “access versus integrity” framing may limit opportunities to improve both access and integrity through policies designed to strengthen electoral integrity and bipartisan agreement.

ABSTRACTMinority voters are more likely to vote in the presence of a co-ethnic candidate. We argue that co-ethnicity should be significantly related to the decision to cast a ballot prior to Election Day. We use national survey data and voter registration files from Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina to test this extension of the co-ethnic mobilization literature. Our findings support the co-ethnic mobilization thesis by demonstrating that black voters were significantly more likely to vote in 2008 and 2012 than in previous elections. This effect, however, is smaller than the significant change toward voting prior to Election Day.

The purpose of this research note is to outline an approach to Election Day polling, which has qualities that may make it an attractive alternative to the exit poll under certain circumstances. An Election Day poll is here understood as a poll where the respondents are asked about their vote in the election on Election Day, and a prognosis of the outcome is presented before the actual result of the election is known. This means that interviewing, processing, analysis and presentation of results all take place on Election Day. It also means that there is an immediate test of the quality of the poll, in its ability to predict the election returns. In contrast to the situation for regular pre-election polls of party preference, deviations between prognosis and election outcome cannot be explained away as a result of changes in voter opinion. In consequence, Election Day polls represent a real challenge to the institutes making them. The situation is different when election fraud cannot be ruled out. In this case discrepancies between poll results and the official election outcome may be interpreted as an indication that the election has been rigged, as the first Ukranian Presidential Election in  exemplifies. In such a case, the poll serves as a check on the quality of the election procedures, rather than the other way round as in established democracies. Most Election Day polls have been exit polls, where voters are interviewed as they leave the polling station (Levy, ; Mitofsky, ; Frankovic, ). The article presents an alternative method, in the form of a panel recruited and interviewed by telephone a short time ahead of the election, and then re-interviewed on Election Day. This approach has been used with success in several election/referendum day polls in Norway since .

On a cold, dark election day morning in January 2004, I watched as a dozen citizens in Kutaisi, Georgia lined up to cast ballots, well before the polling station's doors were scheduled to open. Over the course of the day, almost two million fellow citizens (88 percent of registered voters) followed their lead, visiting polling stations and dropping sealed ballots into clear plastic urns. The eventual winner, garnering 97 percent of the vote, was the leader of the 2003 Rose Revolution, Mikheil Saakashvili. While many Georgians were energized by the promise of improved conditions under "Misha's" leadership, why did they bother to participate when Saakashvili's victory was all but guaranteed?1 KeywordsPresidential ElectionVoter TurnoutRegime TypeElection RuleParliamentary ElectionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

For most voters, election day was warm (the warmest since 1997), if wet (with some of the heaviest rain since the election of February 1974, especially in Scotland). The usual reporting restrictions limited discussion of the election on conventional media to stilted accounts of polling stations opening and politicians casting their votes, although on social media—here as elsewhere driving a coach and horses through much of existing electoral law—there were claims of unusually long queues at some polling stations, along with a larger than normal presence of younger voters, especially in some university towns and cities. In Newcastle-under-Lyme, there were reports of newly registered students being turned away at Keele University despite having polling cards, until council staff were forced to produce up-to-date registers. However, claims of high turnout had frequently been made in the past, only to turn out to be exaggerated, and rumours about the high participation of young voters and students failed to dent private predictions in all the political parties that the election would result in a comfortable Conservative majority.

Studies of voting behavior in some settings may be hampered by poor data availability or unsuitably large units of aggregation for reported turnout. We propose and demonstrate a practical big-data solution to these kinds of challenges, using fine-grained cell-phone mobility data on millions of GPS locations for more than 300,000 eligible voters in Tokyo. Our approach uses the geolocations of polling stations, combined with GPS data points recorded on election day and a reference day, to measure patterns in individual-level (but anonymized) voting behavior. We first test the validity of the measure by comparing it to official aggregated data on turnout, and then illustrate its substantive utility with an application exploring the well-known relationship between turnout decisions and the cost of voting, proxied by the distance between a voter’s residence and the polling station. Finally, we discuss the potential limitations of the approach and provide step-by-step instructions for other researchers.

By 7:30 p.m. on August 12, 2007, seven cell phones chirped above the din of the generator as the first wave of observer reports poured into the small, stuffy headquarters of National Election Watch (NEW), a nonpartisan election-monitoring organization in Freetown, Sierra Leone. 1 Outside, long voting lines had dissipated, and Sierra Leoneans were gathered around their radios, anxious to learn who had won the hotly contested presidential election and whether it was conducted in a fair and proper manner.The campaign period had been marred by violence between ruling and opposition party supporters that broke largely along ethnic lines.This was the first election since the end of the country's brutal 10-year civil war to be run by Sierra Leone's National Election Commission (NEC) rather than the United Nations (UN), and there was widespread concern that heavy seasonal rains would present insurmountable logistical difficulties.A relatively peaceful election day inspired guarded optimism, but it was tempered by concern over the violence that might result if rival political groups refused to accept the results.In its efforts to safeguard Sierra Leone's elections, NEW, like election-monitoring organizations in many other countries, deployed thousands of trained accredited local volunteer observers to polling stations around the country.Their mere presence helped to protect the rights of voters and promote a fair and peaceful election environment.Equally important, they collected valuable information about what happened at each polling station: Were all eligible voters permitted to cast ballots?Did poll workers follow appropriate procedures?Did anyone attempt to disrupt the process?What were the results of the ballot count and did these results reflect the will of voters?This information would allow the leadership of NEW to provide an objective and independent assessment of the conduct of the elections and the credibility of the result.As Sierra Leoneans awaited radio updates, NEW volunteers raced to transmit observers' information to the organization's headquarters in Freetown for analysis.Boys on motorbikes weaved along washed-out roads, carrying the checklists that

State governments have experimented with a variety of election laws to make voting more convenient and increase turnout. The impacts of these reforms vary in surprising ways, providing insight into the mechanisms by which states can encourage or reduce turnout. Our theory focuses on mobilization and distinguishes between the direct and indirect effects of election laws. We conduct both aggregate and individual‐level statistical analyses of voter turnout in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. The results show that Election Day registration has a consistently positive effect on turnout, whereas the most popular reform—early voting—is actually associated with lower turnout when it is implemented by itself. We propose that early voting has created negative unanticipated consequences by reducing the civic significance of elections for individuals and altering the incentives for political campaigns to invest in mobilization.

This article discusses the outcome of a recent empirical project which sought, via field studies with three major UK companies, to ascertain the extent to which a corporate culture of compliance has been developed within UK industry in recent years. The research has provided useful information on the development of competition law compliance culture. For instance, it confirmed the hypothesis that the experiences and perspectives of the particular company affects compliance. The research also provides some limited evidence to support the three key theoretical frameworks which are likely to underpin the establishment and maintenance of effective compliance: deterrence based on rational choice; moral corporate citizenship based on questions of legitimacy and sound corporate governance; and managerial competence based on operational effectiveness and adoption of sound management systems; although it is evident that the deterrent impact of competition law sanctions is the underlying and primary compliance motivation for each of the companies which participated in the research, at least at this stage in the development of UK competition law and UK corporate compliance culture.

This chapter examines how Floridians have changed their voting habits in the recent elections to rely heavily on early in-person voting and absentee voting.A majority of Floridians now vote before election day in general elections.