Blockchain oriented hyperledger based performance driven framework for mass e-voting

Voting is a process for making collective decisions or to express a mass opinion on list of options available. It is a most commonly used instrument to elect a political representative. It is apparent that the methodology currently followed for voting in India can be improved at many levels to make it more robust and efficient. Currently, the voting methodology followed in Indian political elections has two major issues, one is high cost per voter, and low voter turnout. There are many attempts by other democratic setups to tackle this problem by offering online method of voting, but the most trustworthy and promising solution is considered to be voting platform/infrastructure backed by Blockchain. Most of the currently existing Blockchain based voting solutions are computationally expensive, doesn’t provide a verifiable secret ballot, slow, and Byzantine Fault Tolerant Proof of Work algorithms run on a public Blockchain network. The work presented in this paper aims at addressing these issues by proposing Blockchain based framework that leverages Hyperledger Fabric for Scalable Voting System. The proposed method uses Aadhar number for authentication of voters. The proposed method can efficiently cater the secure, trustworthy, and promising to Indian scale. The proposed method offers a various solution, offline and online voting with features such as cost-effective deployments, instantaneous vote counting, Cast as Intended Verifiability, and an observable and auditable architecture. The proposed method has been tested on real time setup and the experimental results are promising.

Democratization of Zemstvo Electoral System in Ukraine after February Revolution of 1917

The paper analyzes the legislation of the Provisional Government of Russia of 1917 which ensured the democratization of the Zemstvo electoral system by introducing general, equal, direct elections by secret ballot. According to the transitional legislation of 1917, elections of county and provincial councillors were held according to the proportional electoral system. As a result of the elections, the provincial and county zemstvos were Ukrainized and democratized by involving peasants’ representatives. However, given voters’ low political culture and lack of political experience, this electoral system proved ineffective. Participation in the elections of mainly one public organization - the Peasants' Union, which received the right to elect provincial councillors, led to a decrease in the zemstvo governors’ professional training level, which was one of the reasons for the zemstvo self-government decline. Elections of volost councillors on the resolution of county zemstvos representatives’ congresses could be held under both majority and proportional electoral systems, which indicates the expansion of suffrage. On the territory of the Left Bank of Ukraine, the elections of volost councillors were held under the majority electoral system, which was quite justified, as voters were not ready for elections on the basis of the proportional system. Holding the volost elections showed a number of shortcomings, which, objectively, included insufficient level of election commissions’ preparation and, as a result, violations of the law. The low level of voters’ political and legal culture did not allow to ensure the proper conduct of the election campaign. Opposition by anti-democratic and anti-Ukrainian forces in the process of holding zemstvo elections led to absenteeism among voters.

2 Overview of ITLOS’s Composition, Organization, Structure, and Rules of Procedure

This chapter provides an overview of the composition, organization, structure, and rules of procedure of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS). ITLOS is composed of 21 judges elected by secret ballot by the States Parties to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) from among persons nominated by States Parties who enjoy the highest reputation for fairness and integrity and of recognized competence in the field of the law of the sea. The United Nations recognizes ITLOS as an autonomous international judicial body with jurisdiction as provided for in the relevant provisions of UNCLOS and its Statute (which is Annex VI to UNCLOS). The UN and ITLOS each undertakes to respect the status and mandate of the other and to establish cooperative working relations pursuant to the provisions of the Agreement on Cooperation and Relationship between the UN and ITLOS. With a view to facilitating the effective attainment of their objectives and the coordination of their activities, they shall consult and cooperate, whenever appropriate, on matters of mutual concern, and pursue, whenever appropriate, initiatives to coordinate their activities. Moreover, ITLOS's Registrar transmits to the UN information and documentation relating to ITLOS's work, including documentation relating to applications, pleadings, oral proceedings, orders, judgments, and other communications and documentation before ITLOS.

Australia’s Electoral Innovations

This chapter explores Australia’s well-deserved reputation as a democratic innovator and, in particular, an electoral innovator. This tendency has been driven substantially by two uniquely Australian inheritances: first, a relative absence of rights protections in the Constitution; and second, a pragmatic political culture less concerned with individualized rights than with utility, fairness, and equality. Australia introduced a number of electoral innovations that have defined and distinguished its democracy, some of which were enthusiastically adopted by other democracies. These include the secret ballot, preferential voting, mobile polling booths, Saturday voting, and, more recently, direct update. It was also an early adopter of women’s suffrage and compulsory voting, the latter of which is arguably Australia’s most important and consequential innovation. The latter also helped to drive the development of integrated, effective, and inventive electoral management that is respected the world over. All of these developments have resulted in an electoral system that is well managed and highly trusted and has unusually high and socially even rates of electoral inclusion. In turn, this has made Australian democracy quite robust.

Election by Community Consensus: Effects on Political Selection and Governance

This paper evaluates the effects of encouraging the selection of local politicians in India via community consensus, as opposed to a secret ballot election. Using village-level data on candidates, elected politicians, government budgets, and workfare employment, I show that incentives for consensus elections lead to politicians that are more educated but less likely to be drawn from historically marginalized castes, and increase how regressively workfare employment is targeted. These results are supported by qualitative evidence that shows that consensus elections are prone to capture by the local elite, which may reduce the need for clientelistic transfers to the non-elite.

Buying Power: Electoral Strategy before the Secret Vote

Research on clientelism emphasizes the use of brokers to mobilize voters. To utilize these agents efficiently, politicians must learn about brokers’ relative abilities and allocate scarce resources accordingly. Drawing upon a hand-coded dataset based on the archives of Gustavo Capanema, a powerful mid-twentieth-century congressman from Minas Gerais, Brazil, this paper offers the first direct evidence of such learning dynamics. The analysis concentrates on Brazil’s pre-secret ballot era, a time when measuring broker performance was particularly straightforward. Consistent with theories of political learning, the data demonstrate that resource flows to local machines were contingent on the deviation between actual and expected votes received in previous elections. Moreover, given politicians’ ability to discern mobilization capacity, payments to brokers were highly effective in bringing out the vote.