Invitation: Celebrate the Power of Women in California, luncheon at the Democratic National Convention.

An event featuring First Lady of California Sharon Davis, Ellen R. Malcolm, President of Emily\u27s List, Senator Barbara Boxer and Senator Dianne Feinstein. Contains list of committee members and reservation form

When the powerful drag their feet

We examine the timing of group decisions that are taken by weighted voting. Decision-making is in two stages. In the second stage, players vote on a policy restriction. In the first stage, players vote to determine the timing of the second-stage decision: “early”, before players’ types are revealed, or “late”. Players differ in both size and voting power. We show that players with greater power tend to prefer a late vote, whereas less powerful players tend to want to vote early. By contrast, large players tend to prefer an early vote and small players a late vote. We present evidence from the literatures on corporate governance, international relations, European Union governance, and oil extraction. We examine an extension in which players choose the qualified majority threshold besides the timing of the second-stage vote

Vote 2018

Poster encouraging students to go and vote for the US midterm elections on November 6, 2018

One share - one vote : a european rule?

In this paper, I tackle the question whether one share - one vote should become a European law rule. I examine, first of all, the economic theory concerning one share - one vote and its optimality, and the law and economics literature on dual class recapitalizations and other deviations from one share - one vote. I also consider the agency costs of deviations from one share - one vote and examine whether they justify regulation. I subsequently analyze the rules implementing the one share - one vote standard in the US and Europe. In particular, I analyze the self-regulatory rules of US exchanges, the relevant provisions of the European Takeover Directive (including the well known break-through rule), and the European Court of Justice's position as to golden shares (which also are deviations from the one share - one vote standard). I conclude that one share - one vote is not justified by economic efficiency, as also confirmed by comparative law. Also the European breakthrough rule, which ultimately strikes down all deviations from one share - one vote, does not appear to be well grounded. Only transparency rules appear to be justified at EU level as disclosure of ownership and voting structures serves a pricing and governance function, while harmonisation of the relevant rules reduces transaction costs in integrated markets

Mandatory Vote Count Audit

Voters, candidates, citizens and election officials want high confidence in the integrity of the election process by subjecting electronic vote counts to independent manual audits; and by making reports available with which to evaluate rates of voter turnout, voting equipment allocation, under-votes, over-votes, spoiled ballots, voting equipment failure, absentee ballots, uncounted ballots, and provisional ballots. This bill requires routine independent audits of vote count accuracy and requires the release to vote count auditors of records and information necessary to verify the integrity of the vote count audits and to evaluate voter service levels

Vote buying revisited: implications for receipt-freeness

In this paper, we analyse the concept of vote buying based on examples that try to stretch the meaning of the concept. Which ex- amples can still be called vote buying, and which cannot? We propose several dimensions that are relevant to qualifying an action as vote buy- ing or not. As a means of protection against vote buying and coercion, the concept of receipt-freeness has been proposed. We argue that, in or- der to protect against a larger set of vote buying activities, the concept of receipt-freeness should be interpreted probabilistically. We propose a general definition of probabilistic receipt-freeness by adapting existing definitions of probabilistic anonymity to voting

Vote-boosting ensembles

Vote-boosting is a sequential ensemble learning method in which the individual classifiers are built on different weighted versions of the training data. To build a new classifier, the weight of each training instance is determined in terms of the degree of disagreement among the current ensemble predictions for that instance. For low class-label noise levels, especially when simple base learners are used, emphasis should be made on instances for which the disagreement rate is high. When more flexible classifiers are used and as the noise level increases, the emphasis on these uncertain instances should be reduced. In fact, at sufficiently high levels of class-label noise, the focus should be on instances on which the ensemble classifiers agree. The optimal type of emphasis can be automatically determined using cross-validation. An extensive empirical analysis using the beta distribution as emphasis function illustrates that vote-boosting is an effective method to generate ensembles that are both accurate and robust