Rodrigo Schneider (Skidmore College and EPRG) has published the paper: “Electronic vs. Traditional Paper Voting Systems in Brazil” in Latin American Politics and Society.
The paper shows that the introduction of electronic voting in Brazil let to a concentration of voter shares among viable candidates, away from nonviable ones.
Please check the entire paper here. The access is free for a short period. Please find the abstract below:
Scholars concur that free and fair elections are essential for proper democratic functioning, but our understanding of the political effects of democratic voting systems is incomplete. This article mitigates the gap by exploiting the gradual transformation of voting systems and ballot structures in Brazil’s 1998 executive elections to study the relationship between voting systems and viable and nonviable candidates’ vote shares, using regression discontinuity design. It finds that the introduction of electronic voting concentrated vote shares among viable candidates and thus exhibited electoral bias. We posit that this result occurred because viable candidates were better able to communicate the information that electronic voters needed to cast valid ballots than were their nonviable counterparts. The article uses survey data to demonstrate that electronic voters responded to changes in ballot design and internalized the information viable candidates made available to them.
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