  Elections play a fundamental role in democratic societies, however they are
often characterized by unexpected results. Here we discuss an election campaign
model inspired by the compartmental epidemiology, and we show that the model
captures the main characteristics of an election campaign: persuasion, betrayal
and regret. All of these three factors can be used together or independently to
influence the campaign, and to determine the winner. We include results for
both the deterministic and the stochastic versions of the model, and we show
that the decision to not vote significantly increases the fluctuations in the
model, amplifying the chance of controversial results, in agreement with the
well known "paradox of not voting".
