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Votes Can Be Confidently Bought in Some Ranked Ballot Elections, and What to Do about It

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2024

Jack R. Williams ,
Samuel Baltz Open the ORCID record for Samuel Baltz [Opens in a new window]  and
Charles Stewart III Open the ORCID record for Charles Stewart III [Opens in a new window]
Jack R. Williams
Affiliation:
Democracy Works, Brooklyn, NY, USA
Samuel Baltz*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Charles Stewart III
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
*
Corresponding author: Samuel Baltz; Email: sbaltz@umich.edu
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Abstract

We show that, in some ranked ballot elections, it may be possible to violate the secret vote. There are so many ways to rank even a handful of candidates that many possible rankings might not be cast by any voter. So, a vote buyer could pay someone to rank the candidates a certain way and then use the announced election results to verify that the voter followed through. We examine the feasibility of this attack both theoretically and empirically, focusing on instant runoff voting (IRV). Although many IRV elections have few enough candidates that this scheme is not feasible, we use data from San Francisco and a proposed election rule change in Oakland to show that some important IRV elections can have large numbers of unused rankings. There is no evidence that this vote-buying scheme has ever been used. However, its existence has implications for the administration and security of IRV elections. This scheme is more feasible when more candidates can be ranked in the election and when the election results report all the ways that candidates were ranked.

Keywords

instant runoff votingranked choice votingvote buyingelection securityelectoral systemselection fraud detection
Type
Article
Information
Political Analysis , First View , pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Society for Political Methodology

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Footnotes

Edited by: Lonna Atkeson

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