“None of the Above?” Casting Blank Ballots in Ontario Provincial Elections
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Are blank or unmarked ballots in an election a random event? The comparative literature on elections suggests otherwise, linking blank ballots to political protest or social and demographic characteristics of voters. Rational choice theory offers explanations rooted in civic duty and net benefits associated with uncompetitive elections. Similarly, when a voter decides to vote, the literature on party competition and electoral turnout offers the possibility that a blank ballot is another choice beyond voting for a specific candidate or party. While little research exists on blank ballots in election systems lacking compulsory voting, this article presents an exploratory analysis using data from the 1999 and 2003 provincial elections in Ontario. The study finds that while demographic characteristics matter, party competition also provides an explanation for casting blank ballots consistent with expectations of rational choice theory.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it