The Boston Foundation

Religion in the study of politcal behavior has produced varied results because of a lack of clarity on the conceptualization of religion and a methodology that can adequately untangle the multiple meanings of religion. Using the technique of propensity score mathching, this dissertation breaks apart the three B's in a number of analyses in order to properly understand how behavior, belief, or belonging operates in isolation from the other two. Focusing on the areas of political tolerance, voting behavior, and public opinion I find the effect of religion varies by type of political behavior. In the case of tolerance, a belief in biblical literalism decreases political tolerance, while church attendance often increases tolerance. Additional analysis finds that church attendance is strongly associated with voter turnout for the Republican candidates. Finally, work on public opinion finds that evangelical religious belonging is strongly related to opinions that are typically considered foundations of the Republican party.

The Reasoned Action model was applied in Portugal to study the factors which determine vote choice among Portuguese voters. Covering three elections (the 1980 Presidential election, the 1982 Local elections and the 1983 General election) the study was started six years after the Revolution of 25 April 1974 which restored Democracy after 48 years of the Salazar-Caetano Dictatorship. The Reasoned Action model, successfully tested in one American Presidential election and in one British General election, assumes that voting intentions are directly related to a) attitudes towards voting for each candidate or party based on knowledge voters possess about important issues and about the candidates or parties stands on them, and b) social influence factors based on voters' beliefs on the opinions of trusted referents as to whom they should be voting for. The results obtained in the three Portuguese electoral studies give strong support to the thesis that in spite of their undemocratic background Portuguese voters like their American and British counterparts make reasoned choices based on their knowledge of important issues and of the differences between the candidates' or parties' stands on such issues. As in the American and British studies the weight of the attitudinal component of the Reasoned Action model was found to be a much more significant determinant of voting intentions than its social influence component.

This dissertation aims to investigate the origins of Internet voting, analyze several deployments of Internet voting technology in Austria and identify - based on these accumulated experiences - building blocks that can be useful in decision-making on and planning of future uses of Internet voting technology within Austria and throughout the world. In line with the goals of this thesis, it will address the following research questions: - How did Internet voting originate? - What experiences were noted in the process of implementing Internet voting in Austria? - What building blocks can be identified for developing future Internet voting both inside and outside Austria? Internet voting is part of a transformational movement that applies information and communication technologies to daily business activities. It is only logical that elections are also considered for applying electronic (remote) communication technologies. While early efforts were driven by the belief that elections could make easy use of the Internet, it was shown that while the principles have to be interpreted and consequently applied in a different way, the same principles can still be derived for Internet voting, like integrity, secrecy, transparency, accountability and public confidence. The need to have forms of decision making in electronic networks has been identified in its beginnings and has received continuous attention throughout its development. At the height of the excitement about the possibilities of the Internet, countries raced to become the first to run a legally binding election using electronic voting systems. While several candidates emerged (e.g., Costa Rica, Bosnia Herzegovina, Germany, United States), Estonia was victorious in 2005. To date, Estonia is the only country that has introduced this form of voting without any preconditions or other limitations. In Austria, the intentions to use information and communication technologies (ICT) in elections concentrated on parliamentary affairs. Spurred by the efforts around student elections in Germany, Austria sought to conduct Internet voting in 2000. In the years thereafter, considerable progress was made at WU Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU), and this progress spearheaded the debate in the early 2000s. At the beginning in the years 2001-2003, technical solutions were sought to verify voter eligibility and maintain voter privacy. Later, more sophisticated algorithms were developed, and functionalities like quotas in election commissions were added. The Federation of Students' elections in 2009 were a remarkable event that demonstrated highly contentious political debate around the topic. This debate continued after the elections, which were held in May 2009 and suffered from the intense debate and protests and consequential organizational shortcomings. The experiences also showed that accurate legal regulations are needed to show interaction with the constitutional legal texts and to ensure accountability to a remote electronic voting channel through legal means. International standards were a first step, but regulations based on actual experience were needed to show how remote electronic voting channels could be realized and how to avoid problems identified in pilot implementations. This practical knowledge also shows that sophisticated algorithms are not always the key to success. Rather, several key implementations make use of very basic technical means to realize the tasks given by law. One should not forget about the voters. They not only need to use such systems, but they also need to understand the processes in order to build trust. The constitutional court ruling lifted the election and ruled that the respective ordinance was not in line with the requirements of the law. Hereby, the court established higher requirements resulting barriers for offering Internet voting channels in future elections. While the election administration system, which was a pre-requisite for the Internet voting system, was discontinued in the election thereafter, it returned in recent elections where postal voting was offered. On the basis of the aforementioned experiences, twelve building blocks were compiled discovered. These include design decisions, such as the following: the form of electronic voting, adaptations of the legal base, the technical means for identification and secrecy, observation, control functions for the electoral commission, evaluation processes, transparency functions, ballot sheet designs, controlling the organizational context as well as providing options for planning and implementation. This framework therefore facilitates and eases the generation of feasibility studies and other analyses and decision making ahead of using Internet voting in an election. With little adaption it can also be used for the use of other voting technologies. This work utilizes theoretical work and knowledge from adaptations of legal texts. These texts cover a wide range of topics, including methods for implementing identification and anonymity functions in remote electronic voting as well as testing and certifying systems that require transparent procedures. The findings also show that implementing remote an electronic voting system is a complex topic. It requires trust in the election administration; otherwise, suspicion will arise when more technology is introduced and implemented in an election process. Remote electronic voting is one of the most challenging information technology (IT) projects.

An election is a core part of any global democracy. Elections provide citizens with the opportunity to voice their opinions. South Africa achieved democracy for the first time in 1994 and has had four successful national elections since then. All of these elections have been declared “free and fair” according to the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC). However, there have been various challenges facing the current South African electoral process. This research, therefore examines alternative methods to improve the current South African electoral process. This research firstly identifies the various challenges and characteristics associated with the current electoral process in South Africa. This research study proposes, to incorporate Information and Communication Technology (ICT) into the South African electoral process. Thus, arguing that utilizing ICT could potentially improve the process. Various countries worldwide have investigated different methods to improve their electoral processes. Countries such as India, Brazil, Estonia and the USA have incorporated ICT into their electoral processes, known as electronic voting (e-voting). Therefore, this research study investigates countries such as India, Brazil, Estonia and the USA which opted to implement e-voting into their electoral process. In addition, various e-voting technologies and their capabilities are explored in detail in this research study. The conclusions drawn from the examination of the electoral processes of countries that utilize e-voting, contributed to the achievement of the primary objective in this research. As a result, to address the various challenges facing the current electoral process in South Africa, a process model was developed called an E-voting Process Model, which depicts two electoral processes namely, an optical scan polling station voting process and an online voting process. This research argues that the E-voting Process Model could potentially improve the current electoral process in South Africa.

Local elections have received little attention in the literature of political science, either as an important component of city politics, or as a source of data on voting behavior. The present exploratory study, as merely one step towards redressing this situation, attempts to identify and analyze some of the political and social cleavages that underlie electoral politics in the city of Vancouver. The phenomena investigated as dependent variables include registration, turnout, ballot spoiling, non-use of votes, referenda voting, and candidate-party voting. The independent variables are the common census-derived socioeconomic characteristics of voters such as age, sex, marital status, religion, ethnicity, education level, occupation, and income. On the basis of a review of some important related studies, a simple model is proposed that sets out a theoretical relationship between these characteristics and voting behavior. The research method employed in the study is ecological analysis which, despite some inherent limitations, provides a suitable tool for the exploration of this relationship through correlation and regression techniques. A number of hypotheses are formulated from the data, but others, obtained from existing studies, have also been tested. The main findings of the present paper are twofold. Firstly, significant and generally explicable cleavages between broad socio-economic groups are revealed with respect to each of the dependent variables. Thus, for example, it is shown that each of the political parties in the city has a more or less solid base of support in voters of a particular socio-economic level. The second general conclusion, closely tied to the first, is that each of the broad groupings has a reasonably consistent and explicable pattern of behavior. Persons in the lowest socio-economic status group, for example, tend less to register and to vote, tend more to spoil ballots and leave votes unused, and tend to oppose referenda issues, as well as tending to vote for certain candidates. From the data and subsequent analysis, a typology is put forward classifying local voter orientation as being either purposive, maintaining, or protesting in nature. Finally, in part employing this typology as an explanatory mechanism, two general hypotheses are proposed which attempt to relate patterns of voting behavior firstly, to the decision-making output of Vancouver's political system and secondly, to persistence and change in the structure of the local party system. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

Magíster en Ciencias, Mención Computación / En los últimos años, organizaciones y movimientos sociales han aparecido demandando más participación en políticas públicas. En éstas organizaciones, los miembros demandan ser parte del proceso de toma de decisiones el cual generalmente se realiza mediante iniciativas de voto directo entre los miembros. Además utilizan Internet intensamente como la plataforma principal de comunicación y tienden a confundir sistemas de encuestas con herramientas de votación electrónica. Por otra parte, no es claro que software se debe utilizar, y la debilidad de la mayoría de éstos que tienen con respecto a la robustez (capacidad de computar bien el resultado) más que con la privacidad del voto, además de la facilidad de uso. Como una forma de mejorar la participación, nosotros proponemos un sistema de votación electrónica para ese segmento, que incluye organizaciones sociales, federaciones de estudiantes, colegios, sindicatos, sociedades profesionales, etc. El problema de votación electrónica ha sido ampliamente estudiado por criptógrafos, y hoy en día, existen varios protocolos para resolver problemas específicos a votación electrónica. Nosotros proponemos una solución que toma en consideración esas soluciones existentes combinadas con protocolos de sistemas distribuidos para introducir un sistema de votación electrónica remota elástica. El sistema utiliza la tecnología elastic computing de Amazon que permite escalar en términos de capacidad de computación y alta disponibilidad junto al anonimato de los votantes y la garantía que el voto fue correctamente contado. Concretamente, el sistema está pensado sobre cinco principios: i) Computación elástica, ii) Internet iii) Facilidad de uso, iv) Anonimato y computación verificable, v) Cliente liviano. El objetivo de esta tesis no es solamente resolver el problema abierto descrito anteriormente, sino también establecer una base sólida para plataformas de votación electrónicas a través de Internet. De este modo, nosotros creamos un nuevo sistema de votación electrónica en donde el votante no realiza ninguna computación grande, sino que la trasladamos al servidor, que idealmente está en una plataforma de Cloud Computing como Amazon Web Services. Esta técnica previene ataques de denegación de servicio, robo de identidad y accesos no autorizados, al mismo tiempo preserva la privacidad y la verificabilidad. La plataforma se probó en un caso real, concretamente en una experiencia de votación electrónica en donde los chilenos demandando su derecho a voto en el extranjero, pudieron votar en una elección simbólica. Se presenta la experiencia, los problemas y las soluciones que encontramos utilizando un sistema de identificación simple. Esta proyecto nos permitió estudiar de forma técnica, política y práctica aplicaciones de votación electrónica en América Latina.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / As the need for large elections increases and computer networking becomes more widely used, e-voting has become a major topic of interest in the field of cryptography. However, lack of cryptography knowledge among the general public is one obstacle to widespread deployment. In this paper, we present an e-voting scheme based on an existing scheme. Our scheme features an efficient location anonymization technique built on homomorphic encryption. This technique does not require any participation from the voter other than receiving and summing location shares. Moreover, our scheme is simplified and offers more protection against misbehaving parties. We also give an in-depth security analysis, present performance results, compare our scheme with existing schemes, and describe how our research can be used to enhance cybersecurity education.

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