Election fraud,digit tests and how humans fabricate vote counts - An experimental approach

The Last Digit test is a notable method to detect election fraud. It is based on an assumption that a manipulator replaces the vote counts of an election result sheet with man-made numbers, but will fail to make the numbers look random. Allegations of election fraud are based on this mechanism, but the strategic behaviour of humans when manipulating election results could make it difficult to detect fraudulent activities. This paper is the first to use a laboratory experiment to evaluate the ability of the Last Digit test to detect human manipulation of election results. Only a small share of participants’ manipulations are detected by the Last Digit test. The small sensitivity is due to the strategic behaviour of participants. Participants in the experiment manipulate as few polling stations as necessary to reach their manipulation aim, manipulate leading digits when the requested intensity of fraud is extremely high, and use alternative strategies that are difficult to detect using the test. The analysis of the experiment further shows that only if participants alter a substantial share of last digits in the experiment the test indicates fraudulent activities.     

Election observer effects: A field experiment in the Russian Duma election of 2011

The literature on elections and election monitoring is divided between those who take a skeptical view, suggesting that monitors are often political rather than objective in their judgments, and those who see monitors as a real force for cleaner, more honest elections. Studies that use field experiments to look for the effect of monitors generally support the optimists, indicating that the mere presence of election observers can have powerful effects. This is surprising given the extent of the resources available to incumbents who wish to conduct electoral fraud. We present the results of an experiment in which 768 observers were randomly assigned to polling stations in 21 cities in Russia in the 2011 parliamentary elections. Unlike most previous studies of election observers, our results suggest that observer effects on turnout and vote for the ruling party are small. The results suggest the need to study more carefully the circumstances that shape the impact of observation missions.     

Bring the party back in: Institutional design for ‘smart election fraud’

Autocrats face a dilemma. Continue with fraudulent electoral practices and risk revolt, or reduce fraud and risk losing elections. One solution is to structure electoral governance such that it allows for independence and professionalism at the center, lending credibility to the electoral process, and partisan local-level administration, enabling fraud at the micro level. Partisan poll workers can help deliver the vote by the use of ‘smart fraud’ – fraud that minimizes the risk of being caught and is used only when needed. In Armenia, the ruling party's vote share, as a proportion of all registered voters, increases with 2.5 percentage points in polling stations where the chairperson was randomly assigned to the ruling party. Fraud forensics suggests that one of the mechanisms behind this was falsification of the results protocol during the count. I conjecture that fraud is only used in high-stakes elections and that election observers are unable to detect it.     

A systematic approach to study electoral fraud

Integrity of elections relies on fair procedures at different stages of the election process, and fraud can occur in many instances and different forms. This paper provides a general approach for the detection of fraud. While most existing contributions focus on a single instance and form of fraud, we propose a more encompassing approach, testing for several empirical implications of different possible forms of fraud. To illustrate this approach we rely on a case of electoral irregularities in one of the oldest democracies: In a Swiss referendum in 2011, one in twelve municipalities irregularly destroyed the ballots, rendering a recount impossible. We do not know whether this happened due to sloppiness, or to cover possible fraudulent actions. However, one of our statistical tests leads to results, which point to irregularities in some of the municipalities, which lost their ballots: they reported significantly fewer empty ballots than the other municipalities. Relying on several tests leads to the well known multiple comparisons problem. We show two strategies and illustrate strengths and weaknesses of each potential way to deal with multiple tests.     

Election Laws,Mobilization, and Turnout: The Unanticipated Consequences of Election Reform

State governments have experimented with a variety of election laws to make voting more convenient and increase turnout. The impacts of these reforms vary in surprising ways, providing insight into the mechanisms by which states can encourage or reduce turnout. Our theory focuses on mobilization and distinguishes between the direct and indirect effects of election laws. We conduct both aggregate and individual‐level statistical analyses of voter turnout in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. The results show that Election Day registration has a consistently positive effect on turnout, whereas the most popular reform—early voting—is actually associated with lower turnout when it is implemented by itself. We propose that early voting has created negative unanticipated consequences by reducing the civic significance of elections for individuals and altering the incentives for political campaigns to invest in mobilization.     

An exploration of Donald Trump's allegations of massive voter fraud in the 2016 General Election

As Republican candidate for president and later 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly and vociferously that the 2016 General Election was tainted by massive voter fraud. Here we use aggregate election statistics to study Trump's claims and focus on non-citizen populations across the country, state-specific allegations directed at California, New Hampshire, and Virginia, and the timing of election results. Consistent with existing literature, we do not uncover any evidence supportive of Trump's assertions about systematic voter fraud in 2016. Our results imply neither that there was no fraud at all in the 2016 General Election nor that this election's administration was error-free. They do strongly suggest, however, that the expansive voter fraud concerns espoused by Donald Trump and those allied with him are not grounded in any observable features of the 2016 election.     

The effect of passive observation methods on Azerbaijan’s 2008 presidential election and 2009 referendum

Election observation is used by domestic and international groups to assess election quality and deter fraud. However, a limited amount of research has assessed its effectiveness. This article adds to the literature by analyzing how a passive monitoring tool affected the process and outcome of voting in two elections in Azerbaijan. The analysis shows that the placement of webcams in polling stations is consistently associated with lower reported turnout and inconsistently associated with lower regime support.     

Election type and the logic of pre-election violence: Evidence from Zimbabwe

Election violence is often conceptualized as a form of coercive campaigning, but the literature has not fully explored how electoral institutions shape incentives for competition and violence. We argue that the logic of subnational electoral competition – and with it incentives for violence – differs in presidential and legislative elections. In presidential elections, national-level considerations dominate incentives for violence. Presidential elections are usually decided by winning a majority of votes in a single, national district, incentivizing parties to demobilize voters with violence in strongholds. In contrast, election violence is subject to district-level incentives in legislative elections. District-level incentives imply that parties focus on winning the majority of districts, and therefore center violent campaigning on the most competitive districts. We test our argument with georeferenced, constituency-level data from Zimbabwe, a case that fits our scope conditions of holding competitive elections, violence by the incumbent, and majoritarian electoral rule. We find that most violence takes place in strongholds in presidential elections, especially in opposition strongholds. In contrast, competitive constituencies are targeted in legislative contests.     

Risk Attitudes and the Incumbency Advantage

Explanations for the incumbency advantage in American elections have typically pointed to the institutional advantages that incumbents enjoy over challengers but overlook the role of individual traits that reinforce this bias. The institutional advantages enjoyed by incumbents give voters more certainty about who incumbents are and what they might do when (and if) they assume office. We argue that these institutional advantages make incumbents particularly attractive to risk-averse individuals, who shy away from uncertainty and embrace choices that provide more certainty. Using data from 2008 and 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we show that citizens who are more risk averse are more likely to support incumbent candidates, while citizens who are more risk accepting are more likely to vote for challengers. The foundations of the incumbency advantage, we find, lie not only in the institutional perks of office but also in the individual minds of voters.     

Voter Partisanship and the Effect of Distributive Spending on Political Participation

Do distributive benefits increase voter participation? This article argues that the government delivery of distributive aid increases the incumbent party's turnout but decreases opposition‐party turnout. The theoretical intuition here is that an incumbent who delivers distributive benefits to the opposing party's voters partially mitigates these voters’ ideological opposition to the incumbent, hence weakening their motivation to turn out and oust the incumbent. Analysis of individual‐level data on FEMA hurricane disaster aid awards in Florida, linked with voter‐turnout records from the 2002 (pre‐hurricane) and 2004 (post‐hurricane) elections, corroborates these predictions. Furthermore, the timing of the FEMA aid delivery determines its effect: aid delivered during the week just before the November 2004 election had especially large effects on voters, increasing the probability of Republican (incumbent party) turnout by 5.1% and decreasing Democratic (opposition party) turnout by 3.1%. But aid delivered immediately after the election had no effect on Election Day turnout.     

Timing and targeting of state repression in authoritarian elections

Autocrats face a fundamental tension: how to make elections appear credible (maintaining legitimacy) without losing control over outcomes (losing power). In this context, we claim that incumbents choose the timing and targets of state repression strategically. We expect that before elections, regimes will moderate their use of violence against ordinary citizens, while simultaneously directing state-sponsored repression towards opposition elites. Ordinary citizens are likely to experience greater repression after the election. We test these expectations using unique events-based repression data, conducting cross-national analysis of all presidential elections in authoritarian regimes from 1990 to 2008 to understand the timing and targeting of repression around elections under authoritarian regimes. In keeping with our expectations, we find that in the months prior and during the election, opposition leaders experience greater rates of repression than voters. We suspect that incumbents find it more effective to repress electoral challengers, since these pose a direct threat to their victory. Conversely, incumbents resist repressing voters whose support they need at the polls to win and to legitimize the election itself.     

Catch Us If You Can: Election Monitoring and International Norm Diffusion

Why has the decision to invite foreign election observers become an international norm? More generally, how do international norms develop in the absence of incentives for cooperation or activism by norm entrepreneurs? Motivated by the case of election observation, I argue that international norms can be generated through a diffusely motivated signaling process. Responding to increased benefits associated with being democratic, international election observation was initiated by democratizing governments as a signal of a government's commitment to democracy. Increased democracy‐contingent benefits gave other “true‐democrats” the incentive to invite observers, resulting in a widespread belief that all true‐democrats invite election monitors. Consequently, not inviting observers became an unambiguous signal that a government was not democratizing, giving even pseudo‐democrats reason to invite observers and risk a negative report. I evaluate this theory with an original global dataset on elections and election observation, 1960–2006.     

Turnout in gubernatorial and senatorial primary and general elections in the South, 1922–90: A rational choice model of the effects of short-run and long-run electoral competition on relative turnout

Using data on non-presidential-year elections for governor and U.S. Senators in eight southern states over the period 1922– 1990, we provide a rational-choice-inspired model of the factors that should be expected to affect the relative levels of turnout in primaries as compared to general elections. Both V.O. Key and Anthony Downs have argued that voters will be more likely to participate in the elections in which they can most expect to be decisive. V.O. Key (1949) proposed that when general elections are usually lop-sided because of one-party dominance of a state's politics the primary of the dominant party of the state should have a higher turnout than the general election. Downs argued that turnout should be higher in competitive elections. Our modelling combines these ideas. We use as our dependent variable the ratio of primary to general election turnout in each year. We posit that this ratio will increase (1) the greater the degree of within-party competition in the primary (especially that within the dominant party of a state, if there is one), and (2) the weaker the degree of between party competition in the general election. In addition to election-specific effects, we also posit long-run effects, such that the ratio for the offices of governor and U.S. Senator will be affected not merely by the degrees of competition within and between parties specific to any given election, but also by the long-run trends in party competition. This hypothesis leads us to expect that, (3) in the South, with the rise of the Republican party, the ratio of primary to general election turnout should decline over time. All of our expectations about the links between turnout and competition are strongly supported. We argue that rational choice models of turnout perform quite well when we view them in a comparative statics perspective, rather than using them to make predictions about who will and who will not vote in any given election.     

Random timing of elections and the political business cycle

In his 1975 paper, Nordhaus formally proves that governments whose aim is to be reelected, will generate ‘political’ business cycles. Empirical results do not confirm this proposition, especially in countries used to early elections. We show that if there is a non-zero probability for elections to be called before the legal term, the political business cycle will be less pronounced, even if no early election actually takes place; moreover, if the normal electoral cycle is interrupted before the legal term, one might observe an inversion of the business cycle, or no cycle at all.     

How campaigns promote the legitimacy of elections

Why do people see elections as fair or unfair? In prior accounts, evaluations of the election depend on people's candidate preferences, where supporters of the winning candidate tend to call the election fair while those on the losing side feel it was unfair. I argue that perceptions of election fairness reflect not just the election outcome, but also the campaign process. Using a set of multilevel models and data from the 1996–2004 American National Election Studies, I explore the consequences of campaign experiences in shaping people's evaluations of the fairness of a presidential election. I find that as campaign competition increases, people are less likely to translate their feelings about the candidates into their evaluations of the election. Rather than alienating citizens, competitive campaigns mitigate the effects of prior preferences in a way that promotes the legitimacy of elections.     

One voter, two first-order elections?

Conventional wisdom has it that elections other than national ones are “second-order elections,” driven by political conditions in the “first-order” national arena. It has not yet been shown that a sub- or supra-national election can exhibit qualities similar to those of first-order elections. This paper uses the 2003 Ontario Election Study, from a provincial election in extremely decentralized federation, to demonstrate that a sub-national election can be a first-order election. Aggregate evidence shows voters' interest and turnout is comparable to national elections. Individual-level evidence shows vote choice is determined by arena-specific factors. And dynamic evidence shows that this sub-national campaign had its own homegrown events that influenced voters, just as campaign events influence national elections.     

Violence, bribery, and fraud: the political economy of?elections in Sub-Saharan Africa

Post-Soviet African democratization has introduced elections into contexts that often lack restraints upon the behavior of candidates, resulting in the emergence of voter intimidation, vote-buying, and ballot fraud. We propose a model of electoral competition where, although some voters oppose violence, it is effective in intimidating swing voters. We show that in equilibrium a weak challenger will use violence, which corresponds to a terrorism strategy. Similarly, a nationally weak incumbent will use repression. However, a stronger incumbent facing local competition will prefer to use bribery or ballot fraud. We discuss the applicability of the model to several African elections.     

The Accuracy of Recalled Previous Voting: Evidence from Norwegian Election Study Panels

Data on individual variations from one election to the next is fundamental in the study of political behaviour, and should, ideally, be collected through panel studies in which the same people are interviewed at two or more or elections. This method is, however, costly and time consuming, and most analyses of this type are therefore based on recall data, in which the voters report their choices in the current election and also in previous elections. The accuracy of recall data is discussed, based on data from the Norwegian Programme of Election Research in the period 1977–97. Analyses show that one must expect, using this type of data, that about one in four voters will give incorrect information about their voting behaviour at the previous election. Erroneous recall of previous voting can be explained by variations in the voters' affiliation to the parties. Whereas stable voters who remain with the same party normally report their voting correctly, erroneous recall varies around 40 percent for party changers and rises to 70 percent among previous non-voters. There is, however, no uniform underlying pattern in erroneous recall during different periods, which implies that it is difficult to predict exactly how erroneous recall will affect the accuracy of recall data in one particular election.     

Fraud,grievances, and post-election protests in competitive authoritarian regimes

Why does election fraud trigger protest in the aftermath of some competitive authoritarian elections but not others? It is often argued that post-election protests occur when information about fraud confirms and reinforces mass grievances against the regime. However, grievances are not universal in autocracies. By focusing on whether government spending primarily benefits the ruling coalition or the masses—thereby affecting economic inequality and mass grievances—the theoretical argument in this article demonstrates how fraud both can lead to post-election protests and work in the autocratic government's favor. I find evidence for the theoretical argument in an analysis of 628 competitive elections in 98 authoritarian regimes (1950–2010). More broadly, the article advances our understanding of competitive elections in autocracies by focusing on how autocratic governments pursue multiple election strategies to promote regime stability and how combinations of strategies affect popular mobilization.     

Does fraud trump partisanship? The impact of contentious elections on voter confidence

Fraudulent elections can reduce citizen trust in elections and other political institutions. But what about the impact of contentious elections that resolve successfully, leading to democratizing change? Do national movements toward democracy trump individual experiences with electoral manipulation? Using public opinion survey data collected before and after the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, we evaluate changes in voter confidence in electoral practices, political institutions, and democracy. Although national trends show increased voter confidence overall, subnational variation suggests pervasive partisan differences in opinions about election quality and institutional confidence. Remarkably, we find that direct exposure to fraud matters far less than anticipated; voters who were personally exposed to fraud felt no more or less confident than their co-partisans. We show that partisanship and the national electoral context may interact in ways that complicate the effects of democratizing elections, suggesting important avenues for future research.