Introduction to the Virtual Issue: Election Fraud and Electoral Integrity

Throughout the world, elections are being used in increasing numbers of nations. Conducting elections is seen as providing legitimacy to elected leaders, as long as they are conducted fairly and with integrity. But it also seems that along with the trends toward more elections around the world there are increasing concerns about electoral fraud and the potential manipulation of the electoral process. For example, recent presidential elections in Mexico have been marred by allegations of fraud and vote buying, including claims that PRI supporters in some areas provided gift cards to voters.1 Concerns about electoral fraud, manipulation and anomalous results have swirled around recent elections in Afghanistan (Worden 2010), Angola (Collier and Vicente 2012), Armenia (Hyde 2007), Iran (Mebane 2010), Georgia (Tucker 2007), Kenya (Collier and Vicente 2012), Kyrgyzstan (Tucker 2007), Mexico (Eisenstadt 2007), Moldova (Senyuva 2010), Russia (Myagkov et al. 2009), Serbia (Tucker 2007), Ukraine (Myagkov et al. 2009; Tucker 2007), Venezuela (Levin et al. 2009), and Zimbabwe (Collier and Vicente 2012) — to name a few of the recent prominent examples. Similar concerns have arisen about some anomalies in recent U.S. elections as well, for example a dispute over the Thirteenth Congressional District’s election in 2006.2 Provoked by election controversies in the past decade, political methodologists have been at the forefront of studying both election fraud and election integrity. This Virtual Issue of Political Analysis presents a number of those recent papers, highlighting the contributions that methodologists have made in developing new approaches to analyze elections data to try to detect anomalies that might indicate the existence of deliberate manipulation that could constitute electoral fraud. Other methodologists have taken a different approach, and while not motivated to detect manipulation or fraud, they have developed analytic approaches that help us better understand and predict election results, and which can be used in the future to improve evaluations of election integrity and analyses of the causes and consequences of election fraud.