The MonkeyCage features a nice by Pippa Norris, Richard Frank, and Ferran Martinez I Coma on new research coming out of the Electoral Integrity Project. The post reports on a recent international survey of election experts ranking 66 countries on a variety of measures of election conduct and administration.
Unfortunately, someone made an ill-advised choice to tag the post “election fraud.”
It may be the Pippa and her colleagues indirectly invited this provocative tag. The first line of their posting reads:
In many countries, polling day ends with disputes about ballot-box fraud, corruption and flawed registers.
Followed in the next paragraph by:
Where there are disputes, however, which claims are accurate? And which are false complaints from sore losers?
The report does not really evaluate the validity of election disputes, nor does it provide a measure of election fraud, however. What is being reported by the EIP is innovative and valuable: evaluations by expert observers of the perceptions of electoral integrity (this is the accurate title of the dataset available from Harvard’s Dataverse) by 855 election experts.
This is not the same thing as “election fraud,” and the report at the EIP website says this (emphasis added):
To address this issue, new evidence gathered by the Electoral Integrity Project compares the risks of flawed and failed elections, and how far countries around the world meet international standards.
EIP shows that there is a strong correlation between expert assessments and liberal democracy (measured by Freedom House and Polity V indicators), thus validating the measure. But it’s important to be clear what the measure is, and is not. For instance, the US ranks relatively low because international experts (and the ODIHR) don’t like the way we draw our district lines or our system of campaign finance.
Neither do many American observers, but I’ve never seen any claims that our no-holds-barred campaign finance system translates into election fraud. Our highly politicized redistricting system distorts the translation of public preferences into legislative seats, but it similarly does not, to my mind, have any relationship to fraud.
This is not a criticism of the EIP or of MonkeyCage. It simply brings to mind Rick Hasen’s description of the ongoing disputes over election fraud and voter suppression in The Voting Wars.
Both grab the headlines and fire up activists, but there is little empirical evidence of either occurring much in the United States.
The recent EIP report says a lot about “election integrity,” “election administration,” and simply “elections” (the appropriate tags), but “election fraud”? The answer to that lies in the future.
The MonkeyCage features a nice by Pippa Norris, Richard Frank, and Ferran Martinez I Coma on new research coming out of the Electoral Integrity Project. The post reports on a recent international survey of election experts ranking 66 countries on a variety of measures of election conduct and administration.
Unfortunately, someone made an ill-advised choice to tag the post “election fraud.”
It may be the Pippa and her colleagues indirectly invited this provocative tag. The first line of their posting reads:
Followed in the next paragraph by:
The report does not really evaluate the validity of election disputes, nor does it provide a measure of election fraud, however. What is being reported by the EIP is innovative and valuable: evaluations by expert observers of the perceptions of electoral integrity (this is the accurate title of the dataset available from Harvard’s Dataverse) by 855 election experts.
This is not the same thing as “election fraud,” and the report at the EIP website says this (emphasis added):
EIP shows that there is a strong correlation between expert assessments and liberal democracy (measured by Freedom House and Polity V indicators), thus validating the measure. But it’s important to be clear what the measure is, and is not. For instance, the US ranks relatively low because international experts (and the ODIHR) don’t like the way we draw our district lines or our system of campaign finance.
Neither do many American observers, but I’ve never seen any claims that our no-holds-barred campaign finance system translates into election fraud. Our highly politicized redistricting system distorts the translation of public preferences into legislative seats, but it similarly does not, to my mind, have any relationship to fraud.
This is not a criticism of the EIP or of MonkeyCage. It simply brings to mind Rick Hasen’s description of the ongoing disputes over election fraud and voter suppression in The Voting Wars.
Both grab the headlines and fire up activists, but there is little empirical evidence of either occurring much in the United States.
The recent EIP report says a lot about “election integrity,” “election administration,” and simply “elections” (the appropriate tags), but “election fraud”? The answer to that lies in the future.