Protecting the Polls: The Effect of Observers on Election Fraud

DateFebruary 3, 2014

Time4:00am to 5:30am

Location
4357 Bunche Hall

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Do domestic election observers deter electoral fraud? And under what conditions do political parties respond to the presence of observers to negate their impact? We address these questions by studying observers’ effects on two markers of fraud — overvoting (more votes cast than registered voters) and unnaturally high levels of turnout — during Ghana’s 2012 presidential elections. Our randomized saturation experimental design allows us to estimate observers’ causal effects and to identify how political parties strategically respond to observers. We show that observers significantly reduce overvoting and suspicious turnout at polling stations to which they are deployed. We also find that political parties successfully relocate fraud from observed to unobserved stations in their historical strongholds, where they enjoy social penetration and political competition is low, whereas they are not able to do so in politically competitive constituencies. The findings have implications for understanding political party behavior and the effects of governance interventions.

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