The primacy effect has long been considered a decisive factor in determining election outcomes and has consequently developed a robust literature dedicated to studying it in different scenarios and contexts. However, existing research has offered limited insight into how the choice of voting method, particularly by-mail voting, may infl uence its impact on elections by altering how and when voters participate. This article fi rst reviews why the primacy effect exists, how researchers identify its infl uence, and its overall impact on election outcomes. It then discusses why the use of by-mail voting
should be expected to alter the primacy effect, and analyzes two works where this relationship has been explored. Their results highlight several of the issues faced when trying to examine this relationship, but also indicate that further study is warranted and likely to be fruitful.

Before the parliamentary elections in 2018, the ruling party in Turkey, AKP, introduced a new apparentement provision in the electoral law, which allowed parties to make electoral alliances in order to meet the electoral threshold. We claim that this was an ex post mistake. AKP’s electoral engineering was motivated by their fear that its coalition partner, MHP, would not exceed the 10% threshold. While MHP actually met the threshold in the election, the opposition party, İP, failed to do so. Thanks to the new law, the votes for İP were not wasted, as would have happened under the old law. AKP less than 50% of seats and it consequently lost the parliamentary majority. Under the old electoral law, AKP would have won the majority. We use four alternative scenarios in order to estimate the seats and evaluate the political consequences of the unsuccessful electoral manipulation

Decision making in international organizations is a multistage and complex process. This paper is confi ned however only to one but the most important stage, either the voting on a one proposal, which may be accepted or rejected, or the choice between two alternative proposals. This seemingly simple, dichotomous decision can be made by many different methods of voting, i.e. simple majority; absolute majority; qualifi ed majority; voting with quorum; weighted voting; voting with a possibility of veto etc. These methods differ in their properties: equal vs. unequal treatment of the participants of decision-making assembly; the manner of respecting of minority rights; equal vs. unequal treatment of possible decisions; sensitiveness to changes of decisions of particular participants; effectiveness and other. These properties express postulates: anonymity; semi-duality; citizen sovereignty; monotonicity and strong monotonicity; unanimity, unrestricted domain etc. Some of these properties exclude the other. The choice of the particular method of voting means an acceptation of some postulates and a resignation from the other postulates.

Analysis of vulnerability of selected social choice methods to strategic voting is presented in the article. Selected methods are: plurality voting, the Borda count and approval voting. Applied procedure allowed strategic voting of unlimited number of voters. With each method voters knew the outcome of the sincere voting, consistent with their real preferences. 24 variants differed on voting parameters; for each variant 1000 random profiles of preferences have been analyzed. Results are different from expected.