Election-Campaign Law

More on detecting election fraud in Iran

By Michael Alvarez

I’ve been digging around most of the afternoon, along the lines of Paul’s recent post, to see what the allegations are, what data exists, and how these allegations might be studied using the sorts of statistical tools that have been discussed in recent research on election anomalies. (At this point, other than what Paul has already referenced, the best I’ve found is a story in Wired.) I’ve not been able to find, yet, any official election results reported, with the sort of fine-grained data that is typically used in this type of work (for example, in the paper on Venezuela that Ordeshook, Levin, Cohn and I are presenting at EVT/WOTE this summer). If anyone knows where to get such data, I’d appreciate the lead.

But this does point back to something that many who have been studying election administration have been saying for years — more and better data is vital for understanding election performance, in the U.S. and abroad.

UPDATE: Ines sent me a link to this spreadsheet with the data by province. The source is The Guardian.

Full post as published by Election Updates on June 15, 2009 (boomark / email).