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This paper aims to discuss reasons for the failure of the 2020 postal-vote election reform in Poland and examine opinions of Poles on voting methods. The main goal is to answer the following research question: Which of the alternative voting methods – postal or electronic – would Poles prefer?

The approach is quantitative and based on the statistical analysis of voters’ attitudes toward alternative voting methods, in particular postal voting.

The main finding is that out of all voting methods available, most Poles favor electronic voting as a potential alternative to voting in person. On a general level, the conclusions from the Polish case highlight the need to establish special requirements and standards for democratic elections during emergency situations. The unsuccessful implementation of all-postal voting in Poland is an example of how changes to the law should not be made, especially when public health and democratic standards are at stake.

The paper presents practical implications and recommendations for state authorities and electoral administration while implementing electoral reforms, extending the list of available voting channels, and running elections – especially in extraordinary situations.

This paper adds to the knowledge on alternative voting channels, including their implementation during a pandemic. The Polish case is also relevant for other countries as regards safe and democratic elections during emergency situations. Policymakers are expected to benefit from the insight, as the results originate in public opinion polls and identify voting channels favored by citizens

Hundreds of thousands of deaths each year in the world are caused by breast cancer (BC). An early-stage diagnosis of this disease can positively reduce the morbidity and mortality rate by helping to select the most appropriate treatment options, especially by using histological BC images for the diagnosis.

The present study proposes and evaluates a novel approach which consists of 24 deep hybrid heterogenous ensembles that combine the strength of seven deep learning techniques (DenseNet 201, Inception V3, VGG16, VGG19, Inception-ResNet-V3, MobileNet V2 and ResNet 50) for feature extraction and four well-known classifiers (multi-layer perceptron, support vector machines, K-nearest neighbors and decision tree) by means of hard and weighted voting combination methods for histological classification of BC medical image. Furthermore, the best deep hybrid heterogenous ensembles were compared to the deep stacked ensembles to determine the best strategy to design the deep ensemble methods. The empirical evaluations used four classification performance criteria (accuracy, sensitivity, precision and F1-score), fivefold cross-validation, Scott–Knott (SK) statistical test and Borda count voting method. All empirical evaluations were assessed using four performance measures, including accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score, and were over the histological BreakHis public dataset with four magnification factors (40×, 100×, 200× and 400×). SK statistical test and Borda count were also used to cluster the designed techniques and rank the techniques belonging to the best SK cluster, respectively.

Results showed that the deep hybrid heterogenous ensembles outperformed both their singles and the deep stacked ensembles and reached the accuracy values of 96.3, 95.6, 96.3 and 94 per cent across the four magnification factors 40×, 100×, 200× and 400×, respectively.

The proposed deep hybrid heterogenous ensembles can be applied for the BC diagnosis to assist pathologists in reducing the missed diagnoses and proposing adequate treatments for the patients.

To provide practitioners of information management with an overview and framework to explore the various controversies associated with the methods of traditional methods of voting with electronically enhanced voting via the internet (I‐voting). The current paper is centered on the assumption that I‐voting is the next logical step in applying online information‐gathering and retrieval technologies to the field of e‐government.

A review of the applied literature on electronically enhanced voting methods with potentials associated with internet voting, as well as from practical experience, resulted in a basic model for discussion of the emergent nature of I‐voting.

I‐voting would reduce the cost for staffing polling stations, and also the funds needed to pay for voting machines. I‐voting could also reduce the number of errors made by both the voters and the electoral administrators, and allow for easier adoption of uniform standards in the ballot format, since it could be transmitted via the internet from a central election agency to all local and regional polling places. Bridging the digital divide and internet security issues may be the most important barriers that must be overcome if I‐voting becomes a viable option in the USA.

It may be years, if ever, before a truly secure, relatively risk‐free internet service, such as I‐voting, is developed. However, despite the controversies associated with election fraud, the numerous current voting systems that are in place suffer from the same problems associated with online informational exchanges; but, for the most part, nations still conduct their businesses and the political systems are still relatively stable.

Owing to recent voting débâcles in the USA, the public is demanding a more reliable and secure method of voting. Currently, many nations are moving more toward electronically enhanced voting methods with the long‐term goal being internet voting. Unfortunately, there are heated debates about the pros and cons of handing over the right to vote, using a system that is prone to security risks from outside sources.

In the short term, there should be increased interest in establishing national and international standards for testing and certification of electronic and I‐voting systems and their IT‐infrastructure. It is a basic premise of the present study that voting online increases voter participation, which can only be viewed in a positive light.

In an effort to increase turnout at elections the UK government has been piloting electronic voting. At the 2002 local elections five councils tested remote Internet voting for the first time. Swindon Borough Council conducted the largest pilot, offering remote Internet voting to all voters. Almost 15,000 voters were surveyed as to their motivation for choosing their voting method. Turnout did increase by 3.5 per cent but it is impossible to state conclusively that this was due to the availability of the Internet voting option, since most Internet voters were already regular voters. Future pilots should allow a more conclusive assessment of the impact on turnout of remote Internet voting.

The individual machine learning methods used for fault detection and classification have accuracy performance at a certain level. A combined learning model composed of different base classifiers rather than an individual machine learning model is introduced to ensure diversity. In this way, this study aims to improve the generalization capability of fault detection and classification scheme.

This study presents a probabilistic weighted voting model (PWVM) with multiple learning models for fault detection and classification. The working principle of this study’s proposed model relies on weight selection and per-class possibilities corresponding to predictions of base classifiers. Moreover, it can improve the power of the prediction model and cope with imbalanced class distribution through validation metrics and F-score.

The performance of the proposed PWVM was better than the performance of the individual machine learning methods. Besides, the proposed voting model’s performance was compared with different voting mechanisms involving weighted and unweighted voting models. It can be seen from the results that the presented model is superior to voting mechanisms. The performance results revealed PWVM has a powerful predictive model even in noisy conditions. This study determines the optimal model from among voting models with the prioritization method on data sets partitioned different ratios. The obtained results with statistical analysis verified the validity of the proposed model. Besides, the comparative results from different benchmark data sets verified the effectiveness and robustness of this study’s proposed model.

The contribution of this study is that PWVM is an ensemble model with outstanding generalization capability. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study has been performed using a PWVM composed of multiple classifiers to detect no-faulted/faulted cases and classify faulted phases.

The first American internet voting (I‐voting) implementation was in 2000. Since then many attempts and trials have taken place in this field. This paper aims to analyze these various attempts and discuss their benefits and vulnerabilities.

I‐voting can provide ease to elderly citizens and people with disabilities. Some also believe that the convenience that the internet offers will attract young voters, and hence increase voter turnout. I‐voting can also solve the problems of late delivery of absentee ballots “which leads to discarding the votes”.

Election officials believe that I‐voting can be considered a valid voting option if it offers at least the same level of security as traditional remote voting methods. On the other hand, many data security experts doubt that the current internet infrastructure is safe enough to support such an important function. I‐voting is still far from being a voting option for US citizens residing in the States; however, it is considered a promising alternative to facilitate voting for those living overseas.

The authors believe this paper contains the most comprehensive analysis of the I‐voting trials that have been carried out in the USA over the last decade.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the risks associated with online voting and to compare them with more traditional voting modes.

A modified version of the Operationally Critical Threat, Asset, and Vulnerability Evaluation (OCTAVE) approach from the CERT Coordination Center® at Carnegie‐Mellon University is used for developing a framework for comparing threats for different stakeholders. In addition, these risks and threats are quantified, offering an opportunity to conduct a multi‐mode risk analysis in a manner independent of the underlying voting modes. The framework is exemplified using data from officials who had been involved in an actual municipal election, in which registered voters were given the option of voting through the Internet.

What is instructive in the context of this study is that the “low‐tech” threats such as large‐scale mail theft of election notifications and family member coercion may in fact be significant for Internet voting, and the sensationalized threats mentioned by the media may pale in comparison in terms of vulnerabilities.

Conclusions drawn from applying the methods may be very sensitive to parameters chosen for quantification, especially since estimates of probabilities of threats may vary in order of magnitude.

This paper demonstrates a quantitative and comparative analysis for Internet voting, something which does not seem to be adequately addressed in the literature.

Since we have seen in the previous chapter that only small part of the shareholder rights is harmonized at the European level, we explore the national regulations in this and the subsequent chapter. In this chapter, we focus in particular on procedural and information rights, including the organization of the meeting, forum rights and the disclosure of ownership information. We find that, inter alia, there are many differences in the national provisions regarding shareholder forum rights, despite article 9 of the Shareholder Rights Directive that provides shareholders with the right to ask questions. Also in the meeting’s organization there are large differences between countries, for example, regarding the use of EGMs.

This paper aims to propose a robust and efficient method for vanishing point detection in unstructured road scenes.

The proposed method includes two main stages: drivable region estimation and vanishing point detection. In drivable region estimation stage, the road image is segmented into a set of patches; then the drivable region is estimated by the patch-wise manifold ranking. In vanishing point detection stage, the LSD method is used to extract the straight lines; then a series of principles are proposed to remove the noise lines. Finally, the vanishing point is detected by a novel voting strategy.

The proposed method is validated on various unstructured road images collected from the real world. It is more robust and more efficient than the state-of-the-art method and the other three recent methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the detected vanishing point is practical for vision-sensor-based navigation in complex unstructured road scenes.

This paper proposes a patch-wise manifold ranking method to estimate the drivable region that contains most of the informative clues for vanishing point detection. Based on the removal of the noise lines through a series of principles, a novel voting strategy is proposed to detect the vanishing point.

The purpose of this paper is to aim mainly at social public decision-making problems, studies the corresponding relationship between different voting rule combinations and the final results, and discusses the quantitative relationships between group intelligence (final votes) and individual intelligence (everyone) to defend democracy under the circumstance of rapid development of network technology, and crowd intelligence becomes more complicated and universal.

After summarizing the crowd co-decisions of related studies, the standards, frameworks, techniques, methods and tools have been discussed according to the characteristics of large-scale simulations.

The contributions of this paper will be useful for both academics and practitioners for formulating VV&A in large-scale simulations.

This paper will help researchers solve the social public decision-making problems in large-scale simulations.