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Election Forensics
Election forensics are methods used to determine if election results are statistically normal or statistically abnormal, which can indicate electoral fraud. It uses statistical tools to determine if observed election results differ from normally occurring patterns. These tools can be relatively simple, such as looking at the frequency of integers and using 2nd Digit Benford's law, or can be more complex and involve machine learning techniques. Method Election forensics can use various approaches. Methods include : (i) Testing for correlation between vote share of a party and turnout (to detect ballot stuffing). (ii) Checking whether votes received for candidates, obey Benford's law. (iii) Checking for disproportionate presence of 0s in precinct vote totals, or of rounded numbers in vote shares. (iv) Deviation from statistical laws observed in election data. (v) Using machine lea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electoral Fraud
Electoral fraud, sometimes referred to as election manipulation, voter fraud or vote rigging, involves illegal interference with the process of an election, either by increasing the vote share of a favored candidate, depressing the vote share of rival candidates, or both. It differs from but often goes hand-in-hand with voter suppression. What exactly constitutes electoral fraud varies from country to country. Electoral legislation outlaws many kinds of election fraud, * also at but other practices violate general laws, such as those banning assault, harassment or libel. Although technically the term "electoral fraud" covers only those acts which are illegal, the term is sometimes used to describe acts which are legal, but considered morally unacceptable, outside the spirit of an election or in violation of the principles of democracy. Show elections, featuring only one candidate, are sometimes classified as electoral fraud, although they may comply with the law and are presente ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Benford's Law
Benford's law, also known as the Newcomb–Benford law, the law of anomalous numbers, or the first-digit law, is an observation that in many real-life sets of numerical data, the leading digit is likely to be small.Arno Berger and Theodore P. HillBenford's Law Strikes Back: No Simple Explanation in Sight for Mathematical Gem 2011. In sets that obey the law, the number 1 appears as the leading significant digit about 30% of the time, while 9 appears as the leading significant digit less than 5% of the time. If the digits were distributed uniformly, they would each occur about 11.1% of the time. Benford's law also makes predictions about the distribution of second digits, third digits, digit combinations, and so on. The graph to the right shows Benford's law for base 10, one of infinitely many cases of a generalized law regarding numbers expressed in arbitrary (integer) bases, which rules out the possibility that the phenomenon might be an artifact of the base-10 number syste ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Machine Learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine learning algorithms build a model based on sample data, known as training data, in order to make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed to do so. Machine learning algorithms are used in a wide variety of applications, such as in medicine, email filtering, speech recognition, agriculture, and computer vision, where it is difficult or unfeasible to develop conventional algorithms to perform the needed tasks.Hu, J.; Niu, H.; Carrasco, J.; Lennox, B.; Arvin, F.,Voronoi-Based Multi-Robot Autonomous Exploration in Unknown Environments via Deep Reinforcement Learning IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 2020. A subset of machine learning is closely related to computational statistics, which focuses on making predicti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Election Monitoring
Election monitoring involves the observation of an election by one or more independent parties, typically from another country or from a non-governmental organization (NGO). The monitoring parties aim primarily to assess the conduct of an election process on the basis of national legislation and of international election standards. There are national and international election observers. Monitors do not directly prevent electoral fraud, but rather record and report instances of suspicious practices. Election observation increasingly looks at the entire electoral process over a long period of time, rather than at election-day proceedings only. The legitimacy of an election can be affected by the criticism of monitors, unless they are themselves seen as biased. A notable individual is often appointed honorary leader of a monitoring organization in an effort to enhance legitimacy of the monitoring process. History The first monitored election was that of an 1857 plebiscite in Mold ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parallel Vote Tabulation
Quick count is a method for verification of election results by projecting them from a sample of the polling stations. The similar Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT) is an election observation methodology that is typically based on a representative random sample of polling stations and is employed for independent verification (or challenge) of election results. A PVT involves observation of the administration of the election, the process of voting and of counting of ballots at the polling stations, collection of official polling station results and independent tabulation of these results, parallel to election authorities. Origin Organizers from the Philippine National Citizen Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) are widely recognized as the pioneers of the quick count, or parallel vote tabulation (PVT) for emerging democracies. During a 1986 Presidential election, NAMFREL attempted to mirror the official count of all 90,000 polling stations. They performed a remarkable task in collect ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Walter Mebane
Walter Richard Mebane, Jr. (born November 30, 1958) is a University of Michigan professor of political science and statistics and an expert on detecting electoral fraud. He has authored numerous articles on potentially fraudulent election results, including a series of notes on the results of the Iranian presidential election, 2009. He authored a paper disputing the Organization of American States's claim of fraud in the 2019 Bolivian general election General elections were held in Bolivia on 20 October 2019. Voters elected all 130 members of the Chamber of Deputies and 36 senators and cast ballots for a joint slate of president and vice president. The Bolivian constitution allows the Pres ... as well. References External links Walter Mebane's pageat the University of Michigan CV at University of Michigan 1958 births Living people People from Long Branch, New Jersey American political scientists Harvard College alumni Yale University alumni University of Mic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tactical Voting
Strategic voting, also called tactical voting, sophisticated voting or insincere voting, occurs in voting systems when a voter votes for another candidate or party than their ''sincere preference'' to prevent an undesirable outcome. For example, in a simple plurality election, a voter might gain a better outcome by voting for a less preferred but more generally popular candidate. Gibbard's theorem shows that ''all'' single-winner voting methods are susceptible to strategic voting, unless there are only two options or ''dictatorial'' (i.e., a distinguished agent exists who can impose the outcome). For multi-winner elections no general theorem for strategic voting exists. Strategic voting is observed due to non-proportionality, electoral thresholds and quotas. Types of strategic voting ; (sometimes "useful vote"): A voter insincerely ranks an alternative higher in the hope of getting that candidate elected. For example, in the first-past-the-post election, voters may vote for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voter Turnout
In political science, voter turnout is the participation rate (often defined as those who cast a ballot) of a given election. This can be the percentage of registered voters, eligible voters, or all voting-age people. According to Stanford University political scientists Adam Bonica and Michael McFaul, there is a consensus among political scientists that "democracies perform better when more people vote." Institutional factors drive the vast majority of differences in turnout rates.Michael McDonald and Samuel Popkin"The Myth of the Vanishing Voter"in American Political Science Review. December 2001. p. 970. For example, simpler parliamentary democracies where voters get shorter ballots, fewer elections, and a multi-party system that makes accountability easier see much higher turnout than the systems of the United States, Japan, and Switzerland. Significance Some parts of society are more likely to vote than others. As turnout approaches 90%, significant differences between vot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voting
Voting is a method by which a group, such as a meeting or an electorate, can engage for the purpose of making a collective decision or expressing an opinion usually following discussions, debates or election campaigns. Democracies elect holders of high office by voting. Residents of a jurisdiction represented by an elected official are called "constituents," and the constituents who choose to cast a ballot for their chosen candidate are called "voters." There are different systems for collecting votes, but while many of the systems used in decision-making can also be used as electoral systems, any which cater for proportional representation can only be used in elections. In smaller organizations, voting can occur in many different ways. Formally via ballot to elect others for example within a workplace, to elect members of political associations or to choose roles for others. Informally voting could occur as a spoken agreement or as a verbal gesture like a raised hand or ele ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elections
An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual or multiple individuals to hold public office. Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy has operated since the 17th century. Elections may fill offices in the legislature, sometimes in the executive and judiciary, and for regional and local government. This process is also used in many other private and business organisations, from clubs to voluntary associations and corporations. The global use of elections as a tool for selecting representatives in modern representative democracies is in contrast with the practice in the democratic archetype, ancient Athens, where the elections were considered an oligarchic institution and most political offices were filled using sortition, also known as allotment, by which officeholders were chosen by lot. Electoral reform describes the process of introducing fair electoral systems where they are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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