In a participatory democracy where every vote counts, voters expect that every vote will be counted. The voting machine is the instrument with which the voting public records its intent and appoints its representatives. In order for the democratic process to function, voting machines must properly function. This thesis examines voter error across Florida's 67 counties in the 2002 and 2006 gubernatorial elections in order to analyze and explain the pattern in voter error as represented by undervotes and overvotes across counties of various demographic and socio-economic characteristics, using different electronic voting systems in the 2002 and 2006 gubernatorial elections. The debate over the accuracy and accountability of touchscreen technology has been prominent for the last several election cycles and in the state of Florida resulted in the banning of use of these technologies. Yet, many counties in the United States still use touchscreen technology. Are touchscreen systems better equipped for reducing voter error? Correlation and Mean comparison analysis suggest that counties that primarily used touchscreen technology on Election Day had lower voter error rates than counties using optical scan technology in the 2006 election. Touchscreen technology was found to eliminate overvoting. Voter turnout was not found to have an effect on voter error rates. Voter error rates were found to be higher in the 2006 election than in the 2002 election for optical scan ballots but not for touchscreen systems. The question of enfranchisement is central to the democratic debate. If every vote counts, then should not every vote be accurately counted? Analysis has shown that the factors with the strongest and most consistent correlation with voter error rates for the 2004 and 2006 gubernatorial elections are educational level, median household income, county population size, and county population density for counties using optical scan systems. For counties using touchscreen machines the only significant correlation found was a moderately strong, negative relationship between median household income and voter error rate for the 2002 election. The correlation between the two was not significant for the 2006 election cycle.

This thesis examines the factors affecting the outcome of the 1948 presidential election. The factors which will be take up are not a complete list of all those influences on the election but will be those which appeared most frequently in writings on the subject and those which, in the writer's opinion, exerted the strongest influence. By combining specific studies of the tree large pivotal states, with the investigation of general factors affecting the election, it is believed that certain rather definite conclusions can be drawn concerning what happened in the country as a whole.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the importance of personal election for candidates of foreign background. I made this, first, by map and comparing the candidates of foreign background in the recent Swedish and Finnish parliamentary election. Second, I analyze what conceptions candidates of foreign background, who was nominated in the 2006 municipal election in Örebro, have about the personal election. The result from the first study shows that personal election had a negative impact on candidates of foreign background in both the Swedish and Finnish parliamentary elections. The result from the second study shows that candidates of foreign background have both positive and negative conceptions about the personal election.

Author of these thesis researches the ability Paired comparison method to predict the results in the presidential elections during January 2018 ( the first and the second round). The pair comparison method is based on the assessment of individual candidates in combinations (pairs) where two candidates stand against each other and there is a judge who compares them in all combinations. The author carried out an investigation using three standardized questionnaires. She has applied the method in the first questionnaire and surveyed the actual choice of the respondents in the other two questionnaires. There were 392 respondents who participated in the complete questionnaire surfy and their answers were analyzed and compared with their results of Paired comparison method. The thesis also shows the accuracy of the method and the suitability of the application, as well as the ability to predict the results of undecided voters. The Paired comparison method in prediction of the results of the first round, but was able to estimate the results of the second round. The author concludes that Paired comparison method should be used in several round types of elections or those where two candidates stand against each other. There are also examined the disadvantages and risks of the method.

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Are political finance regulations supportive or counterproductive to achieving democratic ideals? Do they foster political pluralism and fight corruption? Do they infringe upon political rights like freedom of speech? If they infringe upon rights while fighting corruption, what is the lesser evil? There are so many questions that fuel the debate on political finance regulation. Scholars rarely, if ever, arrive at a consensus in answering any of them. There are many studies that look for relationships between regulations and specific variables in individual countries, but seldom have scholars searched for relationships between regulations and broad measurements of democracy like index scores. This study discovers that positive relationships do exist between index scores and regulations even if they do not reach a meaningful degree of statistical significance in most cases.

Visualisations of election data produced by the mass media, other organisations and even individuals are becoming increasingly available across a wide variety of platforms and in many different forms. As more data become available digitally and as improvements to computer hardware and software are made, these visualisations have become more ambitious in scope and more user-friendly. Research has shown that visualising data is an extremely powerful method of communicating information to specialists and non-specialists alike. This amounts to a democratisation of access to political and electoral data. To some extent political science lags behind the progress that has been made in the field of data visualisation. Much of the academic output remains committed to the paper format and much of the data presentation is in the form of simple text and tables. In the digital and information age there is a danger that political science will fall behind. This thesis reports on a number of case studies where efforts were made to visualise election data in order to clarify its structure and to present its meaning. The first case study demonstrates the value of data visualisation to the research process itself, facilitating the understanding of effects produced by different ways of estimating missing data. A second study sought to use visualisation to explain complex aspects of voting systems to the wider public. Three further case studies demonstrate the value of collaboration between political scientists and others possessing a range of skills embracing data management, software engineering, broadcasting and graphic design. These studies also demonstrate some of the problems that are encountered when trying to distil complex data into a form that can be easily viewed and interpreted by non-expert users. More importantly, these studies suggest that when the skills balance is correct then visualisation is both viable and necessary for communicating information on elections.

This dissertation is concerned with recent changes in levels of voter turnout for presidential elections. Turnout decreased at each election from 1960 to 1976 despite a variety of changes taking place in American society which might have been expected to lead to increased turnout. The present research attempts to shed light on this paradox by means of a longitudinal analysis of a variety of surveys of the American electorate. Data collected by the Bureau of the Census were used in an investigation of changes in turnout across various demographically defined subgroups between 1964 and 1976. The Census surveys provide information about approximately 100,000 persons. Data collected by the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center (SRC) were used in an analysis of the attitudinal correlates of the turnout decline. The SRC samples ranged in size from 1500 to 2000 respondents. A comparison of the Census and SRC surveys revealed that although turnout levels were generally higher in the SRC series than in the Census series, the two series provided similar estimates of the relationships of turnout to such demographic characteristics as region, color, and sex. The traditional sex differential in turnout was found to have narrowed steadily from 1964 to 1976 so that by 1976, female turnout equalled that of males among non-Southern whites and Southern blacks and exceeded that of males among non-Southern blacks. Reversals of the traditional sex differential were particularly pronounced within younger, more educated segments of the population. Further analysis revealed that the sex differential in turnout was related to sex differences in patterns of labor force participation. Differential change by color and region between 1964 and 1968 was also observed; the turnout of non-Southern blacks decreased sharply over this four year period while that of Southern blacks increased markedly. No further change in the color differential was observed in either region from 1968 to 1976, although this finding was later discovered to be the result of increases in the color differential among younger, more educated persons and counterbalancing decreases in this differential among older, less educated persons. Also observed over this 12 year period was a decrease in the traditional regional turnout differential. From 1964 to 1968 and again from 1972 to 1976, Southern and non-Southern turnout rates converged. Approximately 27% of the turnout decline observed between 1968 and 1972 could be attributed to the lowering of the voting age. Among whites, the greatest decreases in turnout over the entire 12 year interval were observed among persons between the ages of 45 and 54. Among blacks, the greatest decreases were observed among the 25 to 34 year old age group while actual increases were observed at the oldest end of the age continuum. Patterns of change by education paralleled to a certain extent the age-related patterns, with the greatest turnout decreases from 1964 to 1976 being observed among whites with between 9 and 11 years of education and among black high school graduates. The attitudinal correlates of turnout examined in this research included measures of party identification, political interest, political efficacy, and political trust. It was found that the aggregate turnout decline from 1964 to 1972 could be statistically "explained" by decreasing party identification and increasing political cynicism. Further analysis revealed that increased cynicism accounted for the sharp decrease in turnout observed among non-Southern blacks between 1964 and 1968 and suppressed the increase in turnout observed among Southern blacks over this same period. The other attitudinal items, although cross-sectionally related to turnout in theoretically predicted ways, failed to explain away the turnout decline.

This thesis describes the circumstances surrounding the presidential election of 1864, including the Civil war and the divided Republican party.

The issue of this thesis is to chart the motivations of non-voters for not attending the election to the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic. This election had the second lowest turnout in the history of the Czech Republic in this type of election which is considered by the citizens to be the most important type of election. A decreasing turnout can be a threat to a proper functioning of democracy. In the theoretical part of the paper, the theory of functioning democracy and the theory explaining the decreasing turnout are introduced. According to several studies, there is a difference between younger and older generation, so I decided to explore this difference. Therefore, fifteen semi-structured interviews with non-voters have been conducted to detect the cause of this situation. Collected sample contains nine younger non-voters and six older ones. The data were analyzed according to the rules of grounded theory. The product of this analysis is a typology of non-voters and their main motivations for non-voting and a scheme of participating factors. The result of the analysis suggests that there is a difference between younger and older generation. Keywords: Non-voters, election behavior, politics, motivations