Signed, Sealed, and Delivered with Trust: Non-Resident Citizens’ Experiences of Newly Adopted Postal Voting

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that the traditional “booth, ballot, and pen” model of voting, based on a specific location and physical presence, may not be feasible during a health crisis. This situation has highlighted the need to assess whether existing national electoral legislation includes enough instruments to ensure citizens’ safety during voting procedures, even under the conditions of a global pandemic. Such instruments, often grouped under the umbrella of voter facilitation or convenience voting, range from voting in advance and various forms of absentee voting (postal, online, and proxy voting) to assisted voting and voting at home and in hospitals and other healthcare institutions. While most democracies have implemented at least some form of voter facilitation, substantial cross-country differences still exist. In the push to develop pandemic-sustainable elections in different institutional and political contexts, variation in voter facilitation makes it possible to learn from country-specific experiences. As accessibility and inclusiveness are critical components of elections for ensuring political legitimacy and accountability these lessons are of utmost importance.In this study, we focus on Finland, where the Parliament decided in March 2021 to postpone for two months the municipal elections that were originally scheduled to be held on April 18. Although the decision was mostly justified by the sudden and dramatic daily increase in new COVID-19 infections, the inability to guarantee the opportunity to vote for those in quarantine was included among the likely risks. The failure to organize health-safe voting procedures to accommodate the original schedule emphasizes a certain paradox in the Finnish electoral legislation: caution in introducing new facilitation instruments has led to lower levels of preparedness and flexibility in crisis situations. Although a forerunner in implementing extensive advance voting opportunities, Finland has only recently introduced postal voting, which is restricted to voters living abroad. Hence, we ask: what can be learned from this form of convenience voting if expanded to all voters to enhance the sustainability of elections?Our analyses are based on a survey conducted among non-resident voters (n = 2,100) after the 2019 parliamentary elections in which postal voting from abroad was allowed for the first time. Our results show that whereas trust in the integrity of postal voting is quite high, various efforts needed from individual voters substantially increase the costs of postal voting. Postal operations also raise concerns. Furthermore, voters felt that requiring two witnesses made postal voting cumbersome, an issue that needs to be resolved, particularly if applying postal voting in the context of a pandemic. The Finnish case constitutes a concrete example of a situation in which voter facilitation targeted to a particular segment of society may become a testbed for electoral engineering that will improve voting opportunities for everyone.

Special Voting Arrangements: Between the Convenience of Voting and the Integrity of Elections

Forms of special voting arrangements (SVAs) conventionally include early, postal, online, proxy voting and use of mobile ballot boxes. Some of these SVAs involve voting within supervised voting stations and some enable voting without/outside polling stations. Over the past years, a growing number of countries across the globe, and in Europe, have utilised alternatives, with early, postal and proxy voting becoming more common. In the past months, the COVID-19 pandemic has led many governments and electoral management bodies to increasingly consider adopting new or scaling up these SVAs to avoid crowded voting on an election day. For in-person voting, examples of elections held in recent weeks in countries such as South Korea offer useful insights on what measures can be adopted to mitigate risks of disease contagion while voters assemble to cast their ballots at polling stations. This lecture and paper by Therese Pearce Laanela, Head of Electoral Processes of International IDEA, discusses the tension between providing convenience for voters by offering different ways of casting their votes and the need to ensure the elections are held with integrity.

How to run pandemic-sustainable elections: Lessons learned from postal voting

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that the traditional “booth, ballot, and pen” model of voting, based on a specific location and physical presence, may not be feasible during a health crisis. This situation has highlighted the need to assess whether existing national electoral legislation includes enough instruments to ensure citizens’ safety during voting procedures, even under the conditions of a global pandemic. Such instruments, often grouped under the umbrella of voter facilitation or convenience voting, range from voting in advance and various forms of absentee voting (postal, online, and proxy voting) to assisted voting and voting at home and in hospitals and other healthcare institutions. While most democracies have implemented at least some form of voter facilitation, substantial cross-country differences still exist. In the push to develop pandemic-sustainable elections in different institutional and political contexts, variation in voter facilitation makes it possible to learn from country-specific experiences. As accessibility and inclusiveness are critical components of elections for ensuring political legitimacy and accountability, particularly in times of crisis, these lessons are of utmost importance.In this study, we focus on Finland, where the Parliament decided in March 2021 to postpone for two months the municipal elections that were originally scheduled to be held on April 18. Although the decision was mostly justified by the sudden and dramatic daily increase in new COVID-19 infections, the inability to guarantee those in quarantine the opportunity to vote was included among the likely risks. The failure to organize health-safe voting procedures to accommodate the original schedule emphasizes a certain paradox in the Finnish electoral legislation: caution in introducing new facilitation instruments has led to lower levels of preparedness and flexibility in crisis situations. Although a forerunner in implementing extensive advance voting opportunities, Finland has only recently introduced postal voting, which is restricted to voters living abroad. Hence, we ask: what can be learned from this form of convenience voting if expanded to all voters to enhance the sustainability of elections in future crises like pandemics? Our analyses are based on a survey conducted among non-resident voters (n = 2,100) after the 2019 parliamentary elections in which postal voting from abroad was allowed for the first time. Our results show that whereas trust in the integrity of postal voting is quite high, various efforts needed from individual voters substantially increase the costs of postal voting. Postal operations also raise concerns. Furthermore, voters felt that requiring two witnesses made postal voting cumbersome, an issue that needs to be resolved, particularly if applying postal voting in the context of a pandemic. The Finnish case constitutes a concrete example of a situation in which voter facilitation targeted to a particular segment of society may become a testbed for electoral engineering (see Norris 2004) that will improve voting opportunities for everyone.

Remote Participation and Proxy Voting in the UK House of Commons

The UK House of Commons has adopted new ways of working in response to the pandemic. These include hybrid proceedings, where some mp s appear in the Chamber and others dial-in remotely, and proxy voting, where mp s can nominate a colleague to vote on their behalf. This article looks at these two new practices to see if there are any differences in their take up by mp s from different political parties, genders and regions. The article shows that there were differences between these groups of mp s and suggests that political party appears the most important factor in explaining these.

Aggregation over Metric Spaces: Proposing and Voting in Elections, Budgeting, and Legislation

We present a unifying framework encompassing a plethora of social choice settings. Viewing each social choice setting as voting in a suitable metric space, we offer a general model of social choice over metric spaces, in which—similarly to the spatial model of elections—each voter specifies an ideal element of the metric space. The ideal element acts as a vote, where each voter prefers elements that are closer to her ideal element. But it also acts as a proposal, thus making all participants equal not only as voters but also as proposers. We consider Condorcet aggregation and a continuum of solution concepts, ranging from minimizing the sum of distances to minimizing the maximum distance. We study applications of our abstract model to various social choice settings, including single-winner elections, committee elections, participatory budgeting, and participatory legislation. For each setting, we compare each solution concept to known voting rules and study various properties of the resulting voting rules. Our framework provides expressive aggregation for a broad range of social choice settings while remaining simple for voters; and may enable a unified and integrated implementation for all these settings, as well as unified extensions such as sybil-resiliency, proxy voting, and deliberative decision making. We study applications of our abstract model to various social choice settings, including single-winner elections, committee elections, participatory budgeting, and participatory legislation. For each setting, we compare each solution concept to known voting rules and study various properties of the resulting voting rules. Our framework provides expressive aggregation for a broad range of social choice settings while remaining simple for voters; and may enable a unified and integrated implementation for all these settings, as well as unified extensions such as sybil-resiliency, proxy voting, and deliberative decision making.

Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainable Finance

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) refers to the incorporation of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations into corporate management, financial decision-making, and investors’ portfolio decisions. Socially responsible firms are expected to internalize the externalities they create (e.g., pollution) and be accountable to shareholders and other stakeholders (employees, customers, suppliers, local communities, etc.). Rating agencies have developed firm-level measures of ESG performance that are widely used in the literature. However, these ratings show inconsistencies that result from the rating agencies’ preferences, weights of the constituting factors, and rating methodology. CSR also deals with sustainable, responsible, and impact investing. The return implications of investing in the stocks of socially responsible firms include the search for an EGS factor and the performance of SRI funds. SRI funds apply negative screening (exclusion of “sin” industries), positive screening, and activism through engagement or proxy voting. In this context, one wonders whether responsible investors are willing to trade off financial returns with a “moral” dividend (the return given up in exchange for an increase in utility driven by the knowledge that an investment is ethical). Related to the analysis of externalities and the ethical dimension of corporate decisions is the literature on green financing (the financing of environmentally friendly investment projects by means of green bonds) and on how to foster economic decarbonization as climate change affects financial markets and investor behavior.