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

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  • CANTÚ, FRANCISCO

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.

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  • Cantú, Francisco, 2019. "The Fingerprints of Fraud: Evidence from Mexico’s 1988 Presidential Election," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 113(3), pages 710-726, August.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:113:y:2019:i:3:p:710-726_7
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    Cited by:

    1. Lundberg, Ian & Brand, Jennie E. & Jeon, Nanum, 2022. "Researcher reasoning meets computational capacity: Machine learning for social science," SocArXiv s5zc8, Center for Open Science.
    2. Escobari, Diego & Hoover, Gary A., 2024. "Late-Arriving Votes and Electoral Fraud: A Natural Experiment and Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Bolivia," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 173(C).
    3. Sharon F. Lean & Evan Bitzarakis, 2023. "Asserting integrity in Mexico's civic sector," Public Administration & Development, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 43(1), pages 70-79, February.

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