New Perspectives on Election Fraud in the Gilded Age

Argersinger, Peter H.

doi:10.4324/9781315488851-4

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Threats of physical violence are often made well in advance of the day of the election, so that the day of the election can itself be relatively free of intimidation. Nonetheless, historical studies from older democracies (Argersinger 1985) and cross-national analyses (Birch and Muchlinski 2018) reveal the persistence of intimidation and violence in and around polling stations. UK elections were historically long thought to be free from electoral malpractices of this type.…”

Section: Existing Literature On Polling Place Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electoral integrity, voter fraud and voter ID in polling stations: lessons from English local elections

James

Clark

2019

Policy Studies

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Polling stations are at the fulcrum of the democratic process. They are the location where most voters exercise their democratic rights, but also one place where electoral fraud and irregularities may occur, both in consolidating and established democracies. This study provides a detailed analysis of the nature and frequency of electoral irregularities that are found in English local elections using original surveys of poll workers in 2018 and 2019 (n=5659). It also identifies the effects of recent attempts to improve electoral integrity through the introduction of voter identification requirements on a pilot basis. Elections are found to be broadly well run but problems are reported with names missing from the electoral register and polling station accessibility requirements. Some more infrequent problems were reported with inappropriate behaviour from party agents/candidate -and some gender-based intimidation amongst voters. Attempted impersonation was exceptionally rare, however, and measures to introduce voter identification requirements therefore had little effect on the security of the electoral process. In fact, they led to some voters not casting their ballot, either for reasons of convenience and availability of suitable forms of ID, or reasons of principle and protest. There are therefore important implications for the wider literature on electoral integrity and the design of democratic practices.

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Section: Existing Literature On Polling Place Problemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electoral integrity, voter fraud and voter ID in polling stations: lessons from English local elections

James

Clark

2019

Policy Studies

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“…Also in the case of the United States, both according to the trend in contested elections and other sources of historical data (Allen and Allen 1981;Argersinger 1985;Jenkins 2004;Kuo and Teorell 2017), the rise of election fraud coincides with the third-party system of increasingly established competition between the Democrats and the Republicans (Burnham 1970;Campbell 2006;Kleppner 1979). Again similarly to Britain, the decline in fraud that then, according to the same sources, seems to have occurred in the early twentieth century coincides with civil service reform after the Pendleton Act of 1883 and the ensuing fight against federal corruption (Glaeser and Goldin 2006;Johnson and Libecap 1995).…”

Section: Extensions To Other Countriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Partisanship and Unreformed Bureaucracy: The Drivers of Election Fraud in Sweden, 1719–1908

Teorell¹

2017

Soc. sci. hist.

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This paper explains election fraud historically in the case of Sweden, drawing on original data from second-instance election petitions filed in 1719–1908. These petitions reveal systematic procedural violations committed by local election officials toward the end of the Age of Liberty in the eighteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, fraud had been largely purged from Swedish elections, and most petitions instead concerned unclear regulations pertaining to suffrage and eligibility criteria. I argue that this development cannot be explained by changes in electoral rules, the degree of competitiveness, or shifts in economic development or inequality. Instead, the ebb and flow of electoral fraud in Sweden could best be understood as stemming from the professionalization of the bureaucracy in combination with the extent to which elections were partisan. This novel mechanism for generating election fraud is corroborated qualitatively in a within-case longitudinal analysis and from quantitative data on city elections in 1771. I argue that similar processes may explain the rise and fall of election fraud historically in other established Western democracies, such as Britain and the United States.

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The role of infrastructural and coercive state capacity in explaining different types of electoral fraud

Fortin-Rittberger

2012

Democratization

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New Perspectives on Election Fraud in the Gilded Age

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Electoral integrity, voter fraud and voter ID in polling stations: lessons from English local elections

Electoral integrity, voter fraud and voter ID in polling stations: lessons from English local elections

Partisanship and Unreformed Bureaucracy: The Drivers of Election Fraud in Sweden, 1719–1908

The role of infrastructural and coercive state capacity in explaining different types of electoral fraud

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