Towards Detecting and Measuring Ballot Stuffing

This paper proposes a method for detecting electoral fraud in the form of ballot stuffing. As ballot stuffing increases both turnout and the incumbent‘s vote share in precincts where it occurs, precincts with low reported turnout are more likely to be clean. Information on clean precincts is used to simulate counterfactual data for "infected" precincts, which are then compared to the observed data. The method is applied to the 2006 Finnish presidential elections. The test fails to reject the hypothesis of no ballot stuffing for the original data, but detects artificially imputed 1.6% fraud. The same test implies that in the 2004 presidential elections in Russia at least 4.7% of the votes were stuffed in favor of the incumbent.