The Fingerprints of Fraud: Evidence from Mexico’s 1988 Presidential Election

Abstract

This paper investigates the opportunities for non-democratic regimes to rely on fraud by documenting the alteration of vote tallies during the 1988 presidential election in Mexico. In particular, I study how the alteration of vote returns came after an electoral reform that centralized the vote-counting process. Using an original image database of the vote-tally sheets for that election and applying Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to analyze the sheets, I find evidence of blatant alterations in about a third of the tallies in the country. This empirical analysis shows that altered tallies were more prevalent in polling stations where the opposition was not present and in states controlled by governors with grassroots experience of managing the electoral operation. This research has implications for understanding the ways in which autocrats control elections as well as for introducing a new methodology to audit the integrity of vote tallies.

The Unintended Consequences of Democratic Reforms: Electronic Voting and Criminal Violence in Brazil

“…While the most popular response to rising levels of violence in Latin America has been the adoption of iron-fist policies, we suggest that democratic-deepening reforms may provide an effective alternative to mano dura strategies that frequently undermined citizen security, human rights, and the legal order (Calderón et al, 2015;Cruz, 2016;Flores-Macías and Zarkin, 2020;Holland, 2013;Magaloni and Rodriguez, 2020;Phillips, 2015). In addition, the effects of electoral manipulation have been widely studied (Cantú, 2019;Hidalgo and Nichter, 2016;Vicente, 2014), and we complement them by showing that election quality can improve substantive outcomes such as security.…”

The Quality of Vote Tallies: Causes and Consequences

“…And, the call to recount "vote by vote, precinct by precinct" after the 2006 presidential elections in Mexico promoted long-lasting mistrust of the electoral system among a large fraction of the citizenry. 1 Inaccuracies in the vote count, of course, could stem from fraudulent electoral practices (Cantú 2018;Hyde 2007;Myagkov, Ordeshook, and Shakin 2010;Simpser 2013). But even in a clean election, the imperfect nature of the counting process makes it impossible to guarantee the accuracy of the tally.…”

“…A key contribution of this paper is to direct attention to the issue of the quality of vote tallies in "normal" elections-that is, clean, routine elections where votes are counted by people. The existing literature discusses the quality of tallies in two specific contexts: fraudulent elections (Cantú 2018;Hyde 2007;Mebane 2010;Myagkov, Ordeshook, and Shakin 2010) and studies of voting technology (e.g., electronic voting machines) (Alvarez, Katz, and Hill 2009;Alvarez and Hall 2008;Ansolabehere and Reeves 2004). Virtually no attention has been given to the issue of tally quality in the modal case: elections where fraud is not an important issue and votes are counted by hand.…”

“…In concurrent elections there is more than one acta per polling station.4 On Mexico's long history of electoral manipulation before those reforms, seeCantú (2018),Domínguez and McCann (1998),Molinar (1991), and Simpser (2012).5 For instance the rule-based allocation of poll workers of different education levels to different polling stations within a precinct or the rule that no polling station may be allocated more than 750 registered voters.…”

The Quality of Vote Tallies: Causes and Consequences

“…And, the call to recount "vote by vote, precinct by precinct" after the 2006 presidential elections in Mexico promoted long-lasting mistrust of the electoral system among a large fraction of the citizenry. 1 Inaccuracies in the vote count, of course, could stem from fraudulent electoral practices (Cantú 2018;Hyde 2007;Myagkov, Ordeshook, and Shakin 2010;Serra 2012;Simpser 2013). But even in a clean election, the imperfect nature of the counting process makes it impossible to guarantee the accuracy of the tally.…”