Statistical Tools For Detecting Electoral Fraud

RockDoctor writes "A recent paper published in PNAS describes statistical techniques for clearly displaying the presence of two types of electoral fraud (PDF) — 'incremental fraud' (stuffing of ballot boxes containing genuine votes with ballots for the winning party) and 'extreme fraud' (reporting completely contrived numbers, typically 100% turnout for a vote-counting region, with 100% voting for the winning party). While the techniques would require skill with statistical software to apply in real time, the graphs produced in the paper provide tools for the interested non-statistician to monitor an election 'live.' Examples are discussed with both 'normal' elections, fraud by the techniques mentioned, and cases of genuine voter inhomogeneity. Other types of fraud, such as gerrymandering and inhibiting the registration of minority voters, are not considered."

Comments

Impossible

[sexconker]

Without tracking who voted for whom, it is impossible to detect any kind of voter fraud (besides more people voting than are eligible) with 100% certainty.

Vote fraudsters would simply rig the vote to some degree under the level of certainty that the statisticians use to watch for fraud.

Re:Voters' intent

[hondo77]

His buddies must have included the entire Minnesota Supreme Court, since it was their unanimous decision that rejected his opponent's appeal. But don't let facts stop you from your right-wing conspiracy theories.

How can anyone legitimately object to Voter ID?

[djh101010]

Seriously. The whole point of the law is to make sure people are only voting where they live. In Wisconsin at least, IDs for voting are free. Yet, people cry "disenfranchisement", as if somehow anyone, even someone who has no job, can somehow survive without a state issued ID. Can someone please, without frothing at the mouth and namecalling, help me understand what the actual objections of "Wow, you should be able to prove you're voting where you live", is a problem? Especially when, see previous re: State issued ID cards being free?

Election fraud

[xenobyte]

Disclaimer: I haven't read TFA - my PDF-reader locks up on this document for some reason.

There is one kind of fraud that can never be detected by any means, and that it to alter each vote as they are placed, i.e. identical in every way to the voter having cast his vote elsewhere. Electronic voting machines are perfect for this. A similar technique would be to point a gun at some of the voters head and make them vote a certain way.

"Suffing the ballot boxes" - reminds me of that Blackadder episode with the "rotten borough" with just one voter: Baldrick of course. When he has cast his vote the result is announced: A completely new candidate wins with over 1.000 write-in votes, and one invalid vote (Baldricks obviously) is disregarded. That was clearly a perfectly fine election with no statistical anormalies.