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

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.

Fake or Visual Trickery? Understanding the Quantitative Visual Rhetoric in the News

“…Closing out the narrative, the Fox & Friends interviewer stated, "It makes everyone who votes and votes earnestly feel like their vote might matter a little bit less," noting that Pennsylvania and Colorado are key swing states that will decide the presidential election. The commentator confidently made this assertion based on the extrapolation from these four examples, even though it is highly unlikely that these examples provide evidence of any impact of voter fraud on U.S. presidential elections (Goel, Meredith, Morse, Rothschild, & Shirani-Mehr, 2017).…”

The racial burden of voter list maintenance errors: Evidence from Wisconsin’s supplemental movers poll books

“…When all of this information is available and accurate, it is unlikely that two matched registrations belong to distinct people ( 5 ). However, this information is not always known or accurate in both states, which can lead to two registrations with similar information that nonetheless belong to two distinct people being erroneously classified as pertaining to the same person ( 6 ). When this happens, it can give the false impression that a registrant has moved.…”

“…Further, even when administrative records are correctly linked to a particular registrant, identifying the current residence of a registrant can be challenging, particularly if someone is a frequent mover ( 7 ). For example, individuals with multiple registrations sometimes do vote at the address of registration for the registration with an earlier registration date ( 6 ). This might arise when one state reports the date a registration was initiated as the registration date, while another reports the date the registration was last updated.…”

Voting over a Distributed Ledger: An interdisciplinary perspective

“…Klimek et al [31] develop new methods from statistical physics to detect ballot stuffing and conclude that Duma and presidential elections in Russia in 2011 and 2012 suggest much ballot stuffing. Measures of voter fraud in US elections however suggest that at least double voting or voter impersonation is quite rare [3,26]. In the UK, there is no consensus over the degree of voter fraud.…”