Election forensics using statistical methods in practice?

Question

Are you aware of any examples of election forensics in practice? Or at least any applied research on real large-scale datasets (e.g. govermental elections)? Thanks.

http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/elections/election2000/butterfly.review.pdf - Wouldn't consider it "applied" research, but may be of interest. — Andy W, Jul 12 '11 at 14:44

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 12 '11 at 15:06

Walter Mebane (University of Michigan) has written a lot on using Benford's Law distributions of digits as tests for electoral fraud, both as a methods problem and in a series of applications. There are several working papers listed here: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 13 '11 at 17:12

A quick Google led to a paper by Cantu and Saiegh on Argentinian elections, which appears to have some good references as well. The website FiveThirtyEight does a lot of election prediction and perhaps has some good links. And I seem to remember Andrew Gelman doing some forensics work, but couldn't find a link.

Election forensics using statistical methods in practice?

2 Answers2