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.

中文翻译：

---

选票的赢家和输家：巴西的电子与传统纸质投票系统

学者们一致认为，自由和公平的选举对于适当的民主运作至关重要，但我们对民主投票制度的政治影响的理解是不完整的。本文通过利用 1998 年巴西行政选举中投票制度和投票结构的逐渐转变来缩小差距，使用回归不连续设计研究投票制度与可行和不可行候选人投票份额之间的关系。它发现，电子投票的引入集中了可行候选人的投票份额，因此表现出选举偏见。我们认为，之所以会出现这种结果，是因为与不可行的候选人相比，可行的候选人能够更好地传达电子选民投票所需的信息。