USA 2020 Elections: Thread

[grarpamp]

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.09839
Election forensic analysis of the Turkish Constitutional Referendum 2017
Peter Klimek, Raul Jimenez, Manuel Hidalgo, Abraham Hinteregger, Stefan Thurner
 With a majority of 'Yes' votes in the Constitutional Referendum of
2017, Turkey continues its transition from democracy to autocracy. By
the will of the Turkish people, this referendum transferred
practically all executive power to president Erdogan. However, the
referendum was confronted with a substantial number of allegations of
electoral misconducts and irregularities, ranging from state coercion
of 'No' supporters to the controversial validity of unstamped ballots.
In this note we report the results of an election forensic analysis of
the 2017 referendum to clarify to what extent these voting
irregularities were present and if they were able to influence the
outcome of the referendum. We specifically apply novel statistical
forensics tests to further identify the specific nature of electoral
malpractices. In particular, we test whether the data contains
fingerprints for ballot-stuffing (submission of multiple ballots per
person during the vote) and voter rigging (coercion and intimidation
of voters). Additionally, we perform tests to identify numerical
anomalies in the election results. We find systematic and highly
significant support for the presence of both, ballot-stuffing and
voter rigging. In 6% of stations we find signs for ballot-stuffing
with an error (probability of ballot-stuffing not happening) of 0.15%
(3 sigma event). The influence of these vote distortions were large
enough to tip the overall balance from 'No' to a majority of 'Yes'
votes.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1205.3645
Forensic Analysis of the Venezuelan Recall Referendum
Raúl Jiménez
 The best way to reconcile political actors in a controversial
electoral process is a full audit. When this is not possible,
statistical tools may be useful for measuring the likelihood of the
results. The Venezuelan recall referendum (2004) provides a suitable
dataset for thinking about this important problem. The cost of errors
in examining an allegation of electoral fraud can be enormous. They
can range from legitimizing an unfair election to supporting an
unfounded accusation, with serious political implications. For this
reason, we must be very selective about data, hypotheses and test
statistics that will be used. This article offers a critical review of
recent statistical literature on the Venezuelan referendum. In
addition, we propose a testing methodology, based exclusively on vote
counting, that is potentially useful in election forensics. The
referendum is reexamined, offering new and intriguing aspects to
previous analyses. The main conclusion is that there were a
significant number of irregularities in the vote counting that
introduced a bias in favor of the winning option. A plausible scenario
in which the irregularities could overturn the results is also
discussed.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.02841
Bipartisanship breakdown, functional networks and forensic analysis in
Spanish 2015 and 2016 national elections
Juan Fernández-Gracia, Lucas Lacasa
 In this paper we present a social network and forensic analysis of
the vote counts of Spanish national elections that took place in
December 2015 and their sequel in June 2016. Vote counts are extracted
at the level of municipalities, yielding an unusually high resolution
dataset with over 8000 samples. We initially consider the phenomenon
of Bipartisanship breakdown by analysing spatial distributions of
several Bipartisanship indices. We find that such breakdown is more
prominent close to cosmopolite and largely populated areas and less
important in rural areas where Bipartisanship still prevails, and its
evolution mildly consolidates in the 2016 round, with some evidence of
Bipartisanship reinforcement which we hypothesize to be due to
psychological mechanisms of risk aversion. On a third step we explore
to which extent vote data are faithful by applying forensic techniques
to vote statistics. We first explore the conformance of first digit
distributions to Benford's law for each of the main political parties.
The results and interpretations are mixed and vary across different
levels of aggregation, finding a general good quantitative agreement
at the national scale for both municipalities and precincts but
finding systematic nonconformance at the level of individual
precincts. As a complementary metric, we further explore the
co-occurring statistics of voteshare and turnout, finding a mild
tendency in the clusters of the conservative party to smear out
towards the area of high turnout and voteshare, what has been
previously interpreted as a possible sign of incremental fraud. In
every case results are qualitatively similar between 2015 and 2016
elections.