Legal petitions to nullify electoral results comprise a rich source for studying electoral fraud. During a fifty-year period in Costa Rica, parties submitted 120 petitions to Congress, containing more than 1,200 charges of fraud. The petitions reveal that between 1901 and 1938, more than half of such accusations took place in the country's peripheral provinces, where roughly 20 percent of voters lived. They also show that institutional changes helped to shape the nature, frequency, and magnitude of fraud. By the 1940s, the polarization of political competition was accompanied by a geographical redistribution of fraud to the central provinces of the republic, where most of the electorate resided.

Stuffing the Ballot Box is a pioneering study of electoral fraud and reform. It focuses on Costa Rica, a country where parties gradually transformed a fraud-ridden political system into one renowned for its stability and fair elections by the mid-twentieth century. Lehoucq and Molina draw upon a unique database of more than 1,300 accusations of ballot-rigging to show that parties denounced fraud where electoral laws made the struggle for power more competitive. They explain how institutional arrangements generated opportunities for executives to assemble legislative coalitions to enact far-reaching reforms. This book also argues that nonpartisan commissions should run elections and explains why splitting responsibility over election affairs between the executive and the legislature is a recipe for partisan rancour and political conflict. Stuffing the Ballot Box will interest a broad array of political and social scientists, constitutional scholars, historians, election specialists and policy-makers interested in electoral fraud and institutional reform.

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research-centered examination of the local, regional, and global forces that allowed the Church to become an increasingly socially relevant and reformist force by the close of the 1960s.

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