Mapping Manipulation:
Explaining The Spatial Dimension of Electoral Fraud Using Digital Observation Techniques

Presented at the IPSA-ECP Workshop on Challenges of Electoral Integrity. The Universidad Complutense de Madrid. 7 July 2012.

Fraud tarnishes electoral processes in many of the world’s countries. Widespread fraud has both the potential to compromise delicate transitional processes such as those in Sierra Leone and Afghanistan or to perpetuate the rule of authoritarian elites such as those in Zimbabwe and Kazakhstan. Despite the relevance of fraud to democratization research and policy, relatively little is known about what mechanisms drive fraud or what explains the spatial variation that fraud exhibits within countries.

This paper attempts to answer the question of why fraud varies spatially within a country. Why are ballots stolen in some polling stations and counted fairly in others? I introduce a series of hypotheses related to political competition, natural resources, security, and population density. For each of these I consider opportunity and incentive effects as well as electoral system variables to model spatial variation of fraud within and between electoral districts.

I test the hypotheses on recent elections in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and Kazakhstan. Fraud is operationalized as a dependent variable using both physical recount-based fraud data as well as new statistical metrics drawn from the nascent field of digital observation. This research framework makes large-N quantitative research possible within a single country and a single election. The use of spatial data as the basis for regressions allows analysis about what impacts fraud without the innumerable control variables that cross-national or time-series studies might require.