Hostname: page-component-5f7774ffb-7hcng Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-02-20T21:18:57.436Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

One Person, One Vote: Estimating the Prevalence of Double Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2020

SHARAD GOEL Open the ORCID record for SHARAD GOEL [Opens in a new window] ,
MARC MEREDITH Open the ORCID record for MARC MEREDITH [Opens in a new window] ,
MICHAEL MORSE Open the ORCID record for MICHAEL MORSE [Opens in a new window] ,
DAVID ROTHSCHILD Open the ORCID record for DAVID ROTHSCHILD [Opens in a new window]  and
HOUSHMAND SHIRANI-MEHR Open the ORCID record for HOUSHMAND SHIRANI-MEHR [Opens in a new window]
SHARAD GOEL*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
MARC MEREDITH*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
MICHAEL MORSE*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
DAVID ROTHSCHILD*
Affiliation:
Microsoft Research
HOUSHMAND SHIRANI-MEHR*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
*
*Sharad Goel, Assistant Professor, Department of Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University, scgoel@stanford.edu.
†Marc Meredith, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, marcmere@sas.upenn.edu.
‡Michael Morse, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Government, Harvard University, michaellmorse@g.harvard.edu.
**David Rothschild, Economist, Microsoft Research, davidmr@microsoft.com.
††Houshmand Shirani-Mehr, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University, hshirani@stanford.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Beliefs about the incidence of voter fraud inform how people view the trade-off between electoral integrity and voter accessibility. To better inform such beliefs about the rate of double voting, we develop and apply a method to estimate how many people voted twice in the 2012 presidential election. We estimate that about one in 4,000 voters cast two ballots, although an audit suggests that the true rate may be lower due to small errors in electronic vote records. We corroborate our estimates and extend our analysis using data from a subset of states that share social security numbers, making it easier to quantify who may have voted twice. For this subset of states, we find that one suggested strategy to reduce double voting—removing the registration with an earlier registration date when two share the same name and birthdate—could impede approximately 300 legitimate votes for each double vote prevented.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 2 , May 2020 , pp. 456 - 469
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2020 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

We thank TargetSmart for supplying us with a national voter file. We thank Delton Daigle, Robert Erikson, Daniel Hopkins, David Kestenbaum, Dorothy Kronick, and audience members at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Yale Behavioral Sciences Workshop, the 2017 Midwest Political Science Association Conference, the 2017 Society for Political Methodology Conference, and the 2018 American Sociological Society Computational Sociology Pre-conference for their comments and suggestions. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QM15HX.

References

REFERENCES

Ahlquist, John S., Mayer, Kenneth R., and Jackman, Simon. 2014. “Alien Abduction and Voter Impersonation in the 2012 US General Election: Evidence from a Survey List Experiment.” Election Law Journal 13 (4): 460–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alvarez, R. Michael, Hall, Thad E., and Hyde, Susan D.. 2009. “Studying Election Fraud.” In Election Fraud: Detecting and Deterring Electoral Manipulation, ed. Alvarez, R. Michael, Hall, Thad E., and Hyde, Susan D.. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1–17.Google Scholar
Ansolabehere, Stephen, and Hersh, Eitan. 2010. “The Quality of Voter Registration Records: A State-by-State Analysis.” In Institute for Quantitative Social Science and Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project Working Paper. URL: http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/18550.Google Scholar
Ansolabehere, Stephen, and Hersh, Eitan D.. 2017. “ADGN: An Algorithm for Record Linkage Using Address, Date of Birth, Gender, and Name.” Statistics and Public Policy 4 (1): 1–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ansolabehere, Stephen, and Persily, Nathaniel. 2008. “Vote Fraud in the Eye of the Beholder: The Role of Public Opinion in the Challenge to Voter Identification Requirements.” Harvard Law Review 121 (7): 1737–74.Google Scholar
Barreto, Matt A. 2006. “Do Absentee Voters Differ from Polling Place Voters? New Evidence from California.” Public Opinion Quarterly 70 (2): 224–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beber, Bernd, and Scacco, Alexandra. 2012. “What the Numbers Say: A Digit-Based Test for Election Fraud.” Political Analysis 20 (2): 211–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cantú, Francisco, and Saiegh, Sebastián M.. 2011. “Fraudulent Democracy? An Analysis of Argentina’s Infamous Decade Using Supervised Machine Learning.” Political Analysis 19 (4): 409–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christensen, Ray, and Schultz, Thomas J.. 2013. “Identifying Election Fraud Using Orphan and Low Propensity Voters.” American Politics Research 42 (2): 311–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cottrell, David, Herron, Michael C., and Westwood, Sean J.. 2018. “An Exploration of Donald Trump’s Allegations of Massive Voter Fraud in the 2016 General Election.” Electoral Studies 51 (2): 123–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Election Assistance Commission. 2013. 2012 Election Administration and Voting Survey. URL: https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/eac_assets/1/6/2012ElectionAdministrationandVoterSurvey.pdfGoogle Scholar
Elmagarmid, Ahmed K., Ipeirotis, Panagiotis G., and Verykios, Vassilios S.. 2007. “Duplicate Record Detection: A Survey.” IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 19 (1): 1–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Enamorado, Ted, Fifield, Benjamin, and Imai, Kosuke. 2019. “Using a Probabilistic Model to Assist Merging of Large-Scale Administrative Records.” American Political Science Review 113 (2): 353–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Federal Election Commission. 2013. Federal Elections 2012: Election Results. URL: https://transition.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2012/federalelections2012.pdf.Google Scholar
Fellegi, Ivan P., and Sunter, Alan B.. 1969. “A Theory for Record Linkage.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 64 (328): 1183–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fukumoto, Kentaro, and Horiuchi, Yusaku. 2011. “Making Outsiders’ Votes Count: Detecting Electoral Fraud through a Natural Experiment.” American Political Science Review 105 (3): 586–603.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fund, John. 2004. Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy. San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books.Google Scholar
Garner, Amy. 2019. “Inaccurate Claims of Noncitizen Voting in Texas Reflect a Growing Trend in Republican States.” Washington Post (February 6).Google Scholar
Hasen, Richard L. 2012. The Voting Wars. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Hood, M. V., and Gillespie, William. 2012. “They Just Do Not Vote like They Used to: A Methodology to Empirically Assess Election Fraud.” Social Science Quarterly 93 (1): 76–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopkins, Daniel J., Meredith, Marc, Morse, Michael, Smith, Sarah, Yoder, Jesse. 2017. “Voting But for the Law: Evidence from Virginia on Photo Identification Requirements.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 14 (1): 79–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levitt, Justin. 2007. The Truth About Voter Fraud. New York, NY: Brennan Center for Justice.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowry, Bryan. 2015. “Kobach’s Voter Prosecutions Draw Scrutiny to Proof-of-Citzenship Requirement.” Wichita Eagle (October 18).Google Scholar
McDonald, Michael P. 2007. “The True Electorate: A Cross-Validation of Voter Registration Files and Election Survey Demographics.” Public Opinion Quarterly 71 (4): 588–602.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDonald, Michael P., and Levitt, Justin. 2008. “Seeing Double Voting: An Extension of the Birthday Problem.” Election Law Journal 7 (2): 111–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McVeigh, Brendan S., and Murray, Jared S.. 2017. “Practical Bayesian Inference for Record Linkage.” arXiv e-prints.Google Scholar
Mebane, Walter R. 2009. “Election Forensics: The Second-Digit Benford’s Law Test and Recent American Presidential Elections.” In Election Fraud: Detecting and Deterring Electoral Manipulation, eds. Alvarez, R. Michael, Hall, Thad E., and Hyde, Susan D.. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 162–81.Google Scholar
Miller, Peter, and Powell, Sierra. 2016. “Overcoming Voting Obstacles: The Use of Convenience Voting by Voters with Disabilities.” American Politics Research 44 (1): 28–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Minnite, Lorraine. 2010. The Myth of Voter Fraud. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Montgomery, Jacob M., Olivella, Santiago, Potter, Joshua D., Crisp, Brian F.. 2015. “An Informed Forensics Approach to Detecting Vote Irregularities.” Political Analysis 23 (4): 488–505.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
National Conference of State Legislatures. 2018. Double Voting. URL: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/double-voting.aspx.Google Scholar
Ochsner, Nick. 2016. WBTV News (July 27).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
People For The American Way. 2012. “SC African American Ministers: Voter Id Decision Shows Continued Need for Voting Rights Act.” Press Release.Google Scholar
Pew. 2012. Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient: Evidence that America’s Voter Registration System Needs an Upgrade. URL: https://www.pewtrusts.org/-/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_assets/2012/pewupgradingvoterregistrationpdf.pdf.Google Scholar
Sadinle, Mauricio. 2017. “Bayesian Estimation of Bipartite Matchings for Record Linkage.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 112 (518), 600–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steorts, Rebecca C., Hall, Rob, and Fienberg, Stephen E.. 2016. “A Bayesian Approach to Graphical Record Linkage and Deduplication.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 111: 1660–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stewart, Charles III, Ansolabehere, Stephen, and Persily, Nathaniel. 2016. “Revisiting Public Opinion on Voter Identification and Voter Fraud in an Era of Increasing Partisan Polarization.” Stanford Law Review 68 (6): 1455–89.Google Scholar
Yancey, William E. 2010. “Expected Number of Random Duplications within or between Lists.” In JSM Proceedings, Survey Research Methods Section. Alexandria, VA: American Statistical Association, 2938–46.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Goel et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/QM15HX
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Goel et al. supplementary material

Online Appendix

Download Goel et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 1.3 MB
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.