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Election Fraud: A Latent Class Framework for Digit-Based Tests

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Juraj Medzihorsky
Juraj Medzihorsky*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Central European University, Nador u. 9., 1051 Budapest, Hungary
*
e-mail: juraj.medzihorsky@gmail.com (corresponding author)
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Abstract

Digit-based election forensics (DBEF) typically relies on null hypothesis significance testing, with undesirable effects on substantive conclusions. This article proposes an alternative free of this problem. It rests on decomposing the observed numeral distribution into the “no fraud” and “fraud” latent classes, by finding the smallest fraction of numerals that needs to be either removed or reallocated to achieve a perfect fit of the “no fraud” model. The size of this fraction can be interpreted as a measure of fraudulence. Both alternatives are special cases of measures of model fit—the π∗ mixture index of fit and the Δ dissimilarity index, respectively. Furthermore, independently of the latent class framework, the distributional assumptions of DBEF can be relaxed in some contexts. Independently or jointly, the latent class framework and the relaxed distributional assumptions allow us to dissect the observed distributions using models more flexible than those of existing DBEF. Reanalysis of Beber and Scacco's (2012) data shows that the approach can lead to new substantive conclusions.

Type
Articles
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , Autumn 2015 , pp. 506 - 517
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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Footnotes

Author's note: I am grateful to Tamás Rudas, Gábor Tóka, Levente Littvay, Zoltán Fazekas, Daniela Širinić, Pavol Hardos, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors for helpful comments and suggestions, and the members of the Political Behavior Research Group at CEU for helpful discussion. Replication materials are available online as Medzihorsky, Juraj, 2015, “Replication Data for: Election Fraud: A Latent Class Framework for Digit-Based Tests”, http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/1FYXUJ, Harvard Dataverse, V2 (Medzihorsky 2015b), and include the version of the R package pistar (Medzihorsky 2015a) used in the analysis. The article uses data from Beber and Scacco (2012), which is available online also as Beber and Scacco (2011). Supplementary materials for this article are available on the Political Analysis Web site.

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