Double Voter Perceptible Blind Signature Based Electronic Voting Protocol

Mu et al. have proposed an electronic voting protocol and claimed that it protects anonymity of voters, detects double voting and authenticates eligible voters. It has been shown that it does not protect voter\u27s privacy and prevent double voting. After that, several schemes have been presented to fulfill these properties. However, many of them suffer from the same weaknesses. In this paper, getting Asadpour et al. scheme as one of the latest one and showing its weaknesses, we propose a new voting scheme which is immune to the weaknesses of previous schemes without loosing efficiency. The scheme, is based on a special structure, which directly use the identity of voter, hides it in that structure and reveals it after double voting. We also, show that the security of this scheme depends on hardness of RSA cryptosystem, Discrete Logarithm problem and Representation problem

The Unwritten Rules of Liberal Democracy

This Article is set amidst the distinctly unsettled and unsettling state of governmental practices, legislative policy, and presidential politics of contemporary America. Immediacy, too, introduces its own uncertainty—as compared to the comfortable vantage point of the distant future. But, as I shall argue, there is no realistic alternative to beginning in medias res. To address these issues as they inherently demand, the usual precedents and protocols and precautions must be set aside—if they are not already “gone with the wind.”6 Since the 2016 Presidential Election, and even before, threats to liberal democracy have emerged, in plausible form, as never before inAmerican history. This is largely a tale about the parlous state of “unwritten rules” in a thoroughly politicized polity. Part I traces out two of the most important stages in this development. Liberal democracy depends not only on governmental institutions and officials but, indirectly, on the personal qualities those officials bring to their duties and responsibilities. Nowhere is this more important than at the top of the Executive Branch of government, where personality disorders of the President may take on constitutional significance. “Crazytown”—as it has been called—is thus the subject of Part II.7 Finally, Part III considers the roles of both “Input Controls” and “Output Controls” in protecting liberal democracy against the threat of authoritarian tyranny. For purposes of discussion, a proposed constitutional amendment is introduced and defended. This is an important intellectual exercise, for “without the constant effort to repair and construct liberal institutions of government . . . it is only a matter of time before one or another zealot will seize the chance to impose his private nightmare on the rest of us.

The Unwritten Rules of Liberal Democracy

This Article is set amidst the distinctly unsettled and unsettling state of governmental practices, legislative policy, and presidential politics of contemporary America. Immediacy, too, introduces its own uncertainty—as compared to the comfortable vantage point of the distant future. But, as I shall argue, there is no realistic alternative to beginning in medias res. To address these issues as they inherently demand, the usual precedents and protocols and precautions must be set aside—if they are not already “gone with the wind.”6 Since the 2016 Presidential Election, and even before, threats to liberal democracy have emerged, in plausible form, as never before inAmerican history. This is largely a tale about the parlous state of “unwritten rules” in a thoroughly politicized polity. Part I traces out two of the most important stages in this development. Liberal democracy depends not only on governmental institutions and officials but, indirectly, on the personal qualities those officials bring to their duties and responsibilities. Nowhere is this more important than at the top of the Executive Branch of government, where personality disorders of the President may take on constitutional significance. “Crazytown”—as it has been called—is thus the subject of Part II.7 Finally, Part III considers the roles of both “Input Controls” and “Output Controls” in protecting liberal democracy against the threat of authoritarian tyranny. For purposes of discussion, a proposed constitutional amendment is introduced and defended. This is an important intellectual exercise, for “without the constant effort to repair and construct liberal institutions of government . . . it is only a matter of time before one or another zealot will seize the chance to impose his private nightmare on the rest of us.

FinBook: literary content as digital commodity

This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be

Resilience-Building Technologies: State of Knowledge -- ReSIST NoE Deliverable D12

This document is the first product of work package WP2, "Resilience-building and -scaling technologies", in the programme of jointly executed research (JER) of the ReSIST Network of Excellenc

Obstacles to Environmental Progress: A U.S. perspective

Why, when so many people understand the severity of environmental problems, is progress so slow and sustainability such a distant goal? What gets in the way? Perhaps you have immediately thought of several barriers. In Obstacles to Environmental Progress, Peter Schulze identifies 18 practical obstacles that routinely and predictably hinder U.S. progress on existing environmental problems. The obstacles apply to problems small and large and, in most cases, regardless of whether an issue is controversial. Though the book focuses on the U.S., most of the obstacles pertain elsewhere as well. The obstacles fall into three categories: scientific challenges to anticipating and detecting problems; political and economic factors that interfere with responding; and obstacles to effective responses. While all the obstacles are predictable and common, they have not been systematically studied as related phenomena, perhaps because they span a wide range of academic disciplines. In practice, they often arise as surprises that are then addressed in an ad hoc manner. Might they be better understood and thus more readily anticipated and overcome or avoided? The book seeks to hasten environmental progress by forewarning and thus forearming those who are striving or will soon be striving for environmental progress, and by drawing scholarly attention to the obstacles as a set of related phenomena to systematically understand and more quickly overcome. Praise for Obstacles to Environmental Progress: ‘I have never come across another book that gives students such an accessible and helpful guide to the broad scope of the challenges facing an environmentally sound and sustainable future.’ Al Wurth, Lehigh University ‘We’ve long needed something like this: a gazetteer for answering the endless series of objections and overcoming the repetitive obstacles that stand between us and the environmental progress we urgently require.’ Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and founder of 350.org and Third Ac

Obstacles to Environmental Progress

environment;policy;biology;earth sciences;United States;obstacles to progress;environmental policy;environmental law;environmental regulation;environmental science;environmental progress;environmental solutions;environmental justice;sustainability;uncertainty;decision processes;climate change;problem solving;unintended consequences;systems perspective;environmental monitoring;freedom and environmental policy;scientific uncertainty;cost-benefit analysis;flawed US democracy;disenfranchisement;gerrymandering;campaign finance;technological surprise;environmental design;trade and the environment;economic growth and the environment;statistical uncertainty;inference and extrapolation;scientific error

Acts and joint resolutions of the General Assembly of the state of South Carolina 2021 regular session volume I

The General Assembly of South Carolina regularly publishes acts and join resolutions passed during the regular session of legislation

Why incumbents survive : authoritarian dominance and regime persistence in Russia

Defence date: 20 September 2018Examining Board: Hanspeter Kriesi, European University Institute (Supervisor); Vladimir Gelman, European University at Saint Petersburg; Anton Hemerijck, European University Institute; John Ora Reuter, University of Wisconsin, MilwaukeeWhy do incumbents in electoral authoritarian regimes retain power? This study seeks to answer this fundamental question by linking electoral fraud and sincere voting for the incumbent with incumbent’s distributive politics and, accordingly, by looking at the puzzle of authoritarian survival from two perspectives. An elite-oriented incumbent’s strategy suggests that, unlike democracies, where distributive politics is primarily targeted at voters, authoritarian incumbents inevitably have to deliver benefits to political elites in order to secure their loyalty, which is eventually converted into electoral fraud, repression of the opposition forces, persecution of the media, refraining from challenging the incumbent, and other authoritarian policy outcomes. A mass-oriented incumbent’s strategy implies that, if electoral competition is not meaningless, authoritarian incumbents also have to deliver benefits to the general public in order to secure genuine mass support, which eventually results in sincere voting for the incumbent. This argument is tested on cross-regional data from Russia as a prominent case of persistent electoral authoritarianism. The analysis begins with a poorly studied but an immanent element of any kind of authoritarianism – electoral fraud perpetrated by political elites and their local agents. Having developed a novel measure of electoral fraud forensics based on quintile regression, I demonstrate that electoral fraud in the Russian 2000–2012 presidential elections played a typical role for electoral authoritarianism: it was neither outcome-changing as it occurs in closed authoritarian regimes nor intrinsically sporadic as in electoral democracies, but it was widespread and hardly avoidable by the incumbent. The study then dwells on examination of the federal transfers to regional budgets as a type of public and formally legal yet politically motivated distribution. Not only were the central transfers allocated to the regions according to the principle of electoral allegiance to the federal incumbent presidents, but it also appears that, as authoritarian regime was consolidating over time, the larger amount of transfer funds was allocated to the bureaucracy (as part of the regime’s elite clientele) in order to secure its loyalty. The loyalty of regional elites, in its turn, was eventually converted into distinct authoritarian policy outcomes, including electoral fraud and persecution of the media. This resulted in a general bias of the electoral playing field and, thereby, contributed to sustaining the authoritarian equilibrium. By contrast, the analysis finds no evidence that the politicized transfers influenced sincere voting for the incumbent. These mixed findings indicate that popular support under electoral authoritarianism is still puzzling and calls for further examination, whereas securing loyalty of political elites via delivering them clientelist benefits is crucial for regime survival in personalist electoral dictatorships

Human Enhancement Technologies and Our Merger with Machines

A cross-disciplinary approach is offered to consider the challenge of emerging technologies designed to enhance human bodies and minds. Perspectives from philosophy, ethics, law, and policy are applied to a wide variety of enhancements, including integration of technology within human bodies, as well as genetic, biological, and pharmacological modifications. Humans may be permanently or temporarily enhanced with artificial parts by manipulating (or reprogramming) human DNA and through other enhancement techniques (and combinations thereof). We are on the cusp of significantly modifying (and perhaps improving) the human ecosystem. This evolution necessitates a continuing effort to re-evaluate current laws and, if appropriate, to modify such laws or develop new laws that address enhancement technology. A legal, ethical, and policy response to current and future human enhancements should strive to protect the rights of all involved and to recognize the responsibilities of humans to other conscious and living beings, regardless of what they look like or what abilities they have (or lack). A potential ethical approach is outlined in which rights and responsibilities should be respected even if enhanced humans are perceived by non-enhanced (or less-enhanced) humans as “no longer human” at all