Electoral Due Process

Elections and their aftermath are matters left to the states by the U.S. Constitution. But the Supreme Court has made clear that the right to vote is federally protected, and fiercely so. When an election failure takes place and deprives citizens of their votes, challengers must resort to state law remedies. Many states have procedural requirements for election challenges that are stringent to the point of being prohibitive. This Note argues that the due process concerns raised by these burdensome state procedures are amplified by their voting rights context. Where a voter must take to the courts to vindicate her right to vote, she should not be further deprived by an unfair process. Federal courts hearing cases about unfair election-challenge procedures have been reluctant to interfere and are thus overly deferential to the states. This Note offers a new approach for “electoral due process” claims—an approach that is properly preservative of voters’ substantive rights and their rights to a fair hearing

Electoral system reviews in New Zealand, Britain and Canada: a critical comparison

This article compares the use of people outside government to consider electoral reform in three countries using the single-member plurality electoral system. The composition of electoral reform bodies, ranging from commissions of experts (New Zealand) and ex- politicians (Britain) to assemblies of randomly selected citizens (British Columbia), appears to have influenced how well their recommendations were received by the public. Governments should be careful not to assume that they can retain control of the electoral reform process once they let it out of their hands, as the cases of New Zealand and British Columbia show, where majorities of the voters chose reform

The Drawbacks of Electoral Competition

We examine the effect of the number of candidates and the impact of ideology on the efficiency of the electoral process. We show that the tendency to focus on policies that provide particularistic benefits increases with the number of candidates to the expense of policies that benefit the population at large. Thus, the efficiency of policies provided in an electoral equilibrium worsens when the number of candidates increases. We next show that partisan voters are disadvantaged in the process of redistributive politics, and that the larger the fraction of voters who vote ideologically, the less efficient the political process. This is because electoral competition focuses on swing voters, increasing the values of policies with targetable benefits.

Modeling Electoral Coordination: Parties and Legislative Lists in Uruguay

During each electoral period, the strategic interaction between voters and political elites determines the number of viable candidates in a district. In this paper, we implement a hierarchical seemingly unrelated regression model to explain electoral coordination at the district level in Uruguay as a function of district magnitude, previous electoral outcomes and electoral regime. Elections in this country are particularly useful to test for institutional effects on the coordination process due to the large variations in district magnitude, to the simultaneity of presidential and legislative races held under different rules, and to the reforms implemented during the period under consideration. We find that district magnitude and electoral history heuristics have substantial effects on the number of competing and voted-for parties and lists. Our modeling approach uncovers important interaction-effects between the demand and supply side of the political market that were often overlooked in previous research

Three predictions on July 2012 Federal Elections in Mexico based on past regularities

Electoral systems are subject of study for physicist and mathematicians in last years given place to a new area: sociophysics. Based on previous works of the author on the Mexican electoral processes in the new millennium, he found three characteristics appearing along the 2000 and 2006 preliminary dataset offered by the electoral authorities, named PREP: I) Error distributions are not Gaussian or Lorentzian, they are characterized for power laws at the center and asymmetric lobes at each side. II) The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) presented a change in the slope of the percentage of votes obtained when it go beyond the 70% of processed certificates; hence it have an improvement at the end of the electoral computation. III) The distribution of votes for the PRI is a smooth function well described by Daisy model distributions of rank $r$ in all the analyzed cases, presidential and congressional elections in 2000, 2003 and 2006. If all these characteristics are proper of the Mexican reality they should appear in the July 2012 process. Here I discuss some arguments on why such a behaviors could appear in the present processComment: 6 pages, one tabl

Ranking Electoral Systems through Hierarchical Properties Ranking

Electoral systems are characterized by a wide spectrum of properties that cannot be all satisfied at the same time. We aim at examining such properties within a hierarchical framework, based on Analytic Hierarchy Process, performing pairwise comparisons at various levels of a hierarchy to get a global ranking of the electoral systems. In this way it should be possible to estimate the relative importance of each property with respect to the final ranking of every electoral formula.Electoral systems, global ranking, hierarchy, aggregations

Individual electoral registration still needs a lot of work, if it is not to be a car crash for British democracy

Most of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition’s original programme of constitutional reform has conspicuously failed to get implemented (notably AV, Westminster boundary changes and House of Lords reform). Yet, individual electoral registration (IER), making each voter register themselves instead of a ‘head of household’ doing it, has been pushed through and implementation is about to start. The Electoral Commission calls this the ‘biggest change to the voter registration process since the universal franchise was introduced’. Toby James shows how the reform may yet mean a giant step backwards for British democracy, unless implementation is superbly handled