Measuring Election Fraud: Election Forensics vs. Expert Surveys

• In Event: Electoral Fraud and Integrity

Abstract

There is a growing demand among academic scholars and practitioners for collection of reliable, credible, and consistent evidence of election fraud around the world. There are two distinct approaches to the study of election fraud: expert-based methodology represented by the Electoral Integrity project, and election forensics -- a nascent field of political methodology exploring statistical anomalies in electoral data. Based on the data from several Russian regional elections this study attempts to answer the following questions: How well do the expert-based assessments of election fraud and electoral integrity match election forensics measures? How well the election forensics measures are predicted by various expert-based assessments of election fraud? What possible election-specific or expert-specific factors can explain the observed discrepancy between the measures, if any?

Author

• Kirill Kalinin, Stanford University