Cryptographic voting debuts
Last week, in Takoma Park, Md., a new cryptographic voting system that could ensure accurate vote counts was used for the first time in a real election. MIT’s Ron Rivest, the Viterbi Professor of...
View Article3 Questions: Charles Stewart reads the tea leaves
Tuesday’s slate of elections yielded more bad news for incumbents: Pennsylvania’s 30-year senator, Arlen Specter, was ousted in a Democratic primary by Rep. Joe Sestak, while centrist Arkansas Democrat...
View ArticleLooks like a winner
When you vote in an election, your choice is surely not influenced by anything as superficial as a candidate’s looks, right?Right?New research from MIT political scientists shows that the appearances...
View Article3 Questions: Michael Greenstone on deficit spending
Government deficit spending has been a contentious issue during this year’s U.S. mid-term election campaigns. Yet some economists believe that additional government spending in certain areas is needed...
View ArticleFace value
The looks of political candidates are a key factor influencing voters, a phenomenon identified by a number of scholars in recent years. Now, a new study by MIT political scientists adds to this body of...
View ArticleWhat it takes to make every vote count
Eleven years after the disputed 2000 presidential election thrust the subject of electoral integrity into the spotlight, many of the challenges that jeopardized that election remain unresolved, voting...
View Article3 Questions: Michael Piore on labor disputes at the ballot box
Tuesday’s elections produced a much-publicized result in Ohio, where, by a 61-39 margin, voters repealed an 8-month-old law limiting the collective bargaining rights of public employees, such as...
View Article3 Questions: Adam Berinsky on the unpredictable GOP campaign
The 2012 Republican primary season has featured many sharp swings in the polls, some of which have caught seasoned political professionals by surprise. MIT News spoke with Associate Professor of...
View ArticleAndrea Campbell: Public opinion and policy viewed through an historical lens
Andrea Campbell’s core research concerns resemble a list of hot-button political issues pulled straight from the 2012 presidential campaign: Social Security, Medicare, health insurance, taxation. But...
View ArticleWorking for her country
News@MITSloan recently spoke with Caroline Shinkle, a sophomore at MIT Sloan studying both finance and economics. She was one of the youngest delegates at the Republican National Convention in Tampa,...
View Article3 Questions: Charles Stewart sizes up the 2012 election
With the 2012 campaign in the home stretch, the presidential race and many congressional matchups are too close to call. To hear more about them, MIT News spoke this week with Charles Stewart III, the...
View ArticleChristopher Warshaw: Mapping a Democracy
There is a place for each of us on Christopher Warshaw's geopolitical map of the United States. The recently appointed assistant professor of political science can figure out people's political...
View ArticleThe state of the U.S. election system
When it comes to the integrity and accuracy of voting systems in the United States, the good news is that widespread technological upgrades have largely eliminated the voting-machine problems that were...
View ArticleScholars ponder better ways to elect a president
The upcoming presidential election appears to be so close that either President Barack Obama or his challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, could lose the popular vote, yet still gain the...
View ArticleF. Daniel Hidalgo: it’s electric
Ballot stuffing. Assassination. Revolution. The talk around the dinner table during F. Daniel Hidalgo’s formative years was unlike that of most kids. Hidalgo’s father worked in politics in Mexico...
View ArticleExplained: Margin of error
In mid-October, a Gallup poll of likely voters nationwide showed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney leading President Barack Obama by a 7 percent margin. That same week, a poll by the University of...
View ArticleMIT Libraries’ research contributes to award-winning redistricting software,...
As Americans head to the polls tomorrow, few will give much thought to how their voting district was created, and almost none will have had any direct input in defining its boundaries. Voting districts...
View ArticleDevin Caughey: Straddling the divide between qualitative and quantitative...
Devin Caughey, newly appointed political science instructor at MIT, has spent much of the last few years working with vintage polling data — information gathered in the 1930s and early 1940s, before...
View Article3 Questions: Charles Stewart ranks the voting systems in the 50 states
Do you live in a state that runs its elections particularly well, or poorly? And how would you know? Until recently, says Charles Stewart III, the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political...
View ArticleNate Silver presents forecasting work as antidote to ‘terrible’ political...
Celebrated political forecaster Nate Silver has shot to fame by letting the data speak loudly about elections. But during an event at MIT on Thursday evening, Silver did some forceful talking himself,...
View ArticleMicah Altman wins Pizzigati Prize
Micah Altman, director of research for MIT Libraries, has been awarded the Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest for his work developing software that encourages transparency and...
View ArticleEmpowering women in Afghanistan
In recent decades, Afghanistan has been a notoriously difficult place for women to participate in civic matters. But a new study co-authored by an MIT political scientist, which assessed Afghanistan’s...
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Kenya under the microscope
Occasionally, parents really do know best: When Tavneet Suri first started taking economics as a middle-school student in Nairobi, Kenya, she disliked it. But her father would not let her drop the...
View ArticleInside the minds of voters
Any analysis of exit polling reveals a welter of numbers whose meaning remains slightly elusive, with issues or candidate characteristics described as “very important,” “somewhat important,” or “not...
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