Participation and Welfare in Fraudulent Elections (pdf)
(Job Market Paper)

I analyze a costly voting model of elections, where the incumbent can stuff the ballot box, to investigate how electoral fraud affects voters' participation decisions. I find that two stable equilibria may exist: full abstention equilibrium, where the incumbent wins with certainty and which exists only if the incumbent's capability to stuff a ballot box is sufficiently strong; and a more efficient coordination equilibrium, where a substantial share of a challenger's supporters vote and the probability of the incumbent's defeat is large. Since voters do not take into account positive externality they produce on other voters when deciding to cast their votes, participation in coordination equilibrium is still inefficiently low, and thus subsidization as well as introducing compulsory voting may improve efficiency. Because the higher capability of the incumbent to stuff a ballot box discourages participation of his own supporters and creates coordination incentives for the challenger's supporters, higher fraud does not always benefit the incumbent even when costless. Additionally, the model simultaneously explains two empirical observations about fraudulent elections: a positive relationship between fraud and victory margin as well as a negative effect of fraud on turnout.

Towards Detecting and Measuring Ballot Stuffing (pdf)

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 presumably clean data, but detects artificially imputed fraud and provides a correct estimate of its magnitude. The same method implies that in the presidential elections in Russia held between 2000 and 2012 ballot stuffing was a significant issue, and the number of ballots stuffed in favor of the incumbents had been persistently growing over the period. Regional-level analysis suggests that this is a result of both increasing fraud magnitude and expanding of electoral falsification across the regions of Russia.

Growth of Electoral Fraud in Non-Democracies: The Role of Uncertainty (pdf)

In this paper I study electoral fraud in the non-democratic setting. First, I present evidence of fraud sustainability and growth over the lifetime of non-democratic regimes in post-Soviet and Sub-Saharan countries. Second, I provide a theoretical model that explains the observed tendency of growing fraud. Specifically, in a probabilistic voting model of electoral competition with falsifications, a corrupt incumbent faces two types of uncertainty: uncertainty about voters’ attitude towards fraud and uncertainty about his true support, captured by a purely random component in the voters’ utility over candidates. The model predicts that when uncertainty is sufficiently large, higher uncertainty about voters’ fraud intolerance provides weaker incentives to commit fraud. Over time the incumbent becomes more certain about voters’ reaction to fraud because of learning through Bayesian updating and, thus, as the deterrent role of fraud intolerance uncertainty declines, the incentives to commit fraud become stronger, providing a growing fraud profile.