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\"\"This book is a must-read for anyone concerned with voter fraud in twenty-first-century America. Lorraine C. Minnite defines voter fraud so as to allow the careful, systematic investigation of the subject she reports in this volume. I highly recommend it.\"---Chandler Davidson, editor, Minority Vote Dilution\" \"\"This is the first systematic---and convincing---answer to the decade-long campaign by Republican ideologues, the Wall Street Journal, and, for a time, the U.S. Department of Justice to create what Lorraine C. Minnite rightly calls t̀he myth of voter fraud.' This myth feeds the ongoing partisan efforts in states throughout the country to adopt v̀oter identification' laws, which have the effect of disproportionately disenfranchising minorities and the aged. Minnite's gracefully written book, brimming with fascinating stories and trenchant analysis, provides a clear-eyed, factual background for this major public policy debate. If you want to go beyond slogans and fantasies on voter fraud, this is the place to start.\"---J. Morgan Kausser. author of Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction\" \"Allegations that Widespread Voter Fraud is threatening to the integrity of American elections and American democracy itself have intensified since the disputed 2000 presidential election. The claim that elections are being stolen by illegal immigrants and unscrupulous voter registration activists and vote buyers has been used to persuade the public that voter malfeasance is of greater concern than structural inequities in the ways votes are gathered and tallied, justifying ever tighter restrictions on access to the polls. Yet, that claim is a myth.\" \"In The Myth of Voter Fraud, Lorraine C. Minnite presents the results of her meticulous search for evidence of voter fraud. She concludes that while voting irregularities produced by the fragmented and complex nature of the electoral process in the United States are common, incidents of deliberate voter fraud are actually quite rare. Based on painstaking research aggregating and sifting through data from a variety of sources, including public records requests to all fifty state governments and the U.S. Department of Justice, Minnite contends that voter fraud is in reality a politically constructed myth intended to further complicate the voting process and reduce voter turnout. She refutes several high-profile charges of alleged voter fraud, such as the assertion that eight of the 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote, and makes the question of voter fraud more precise by distinguishing fraud from the manifold ways in which electoral democracy can be distorted. Effectively disentangling misunderstandings and deliberate distortions from reality, The Myth of Voter Fraud provides rigorous empirical evidence for those fighting to make the electoral process more efficient, more equitable, and more democratic.\"--BOOK JACKET.

I examine how the structure of corrupt exchanges between voters and politicians—an important-yet-underexplored form of informal institutions—shapes voters’ electoral behavior toward corruption. I argue that when voters have a clear idea of whom to bribe to secure desired services and how much they need to offer, they are less likely to engage in corruption voting and hold corrupt incumbents electorally accountable for their malfeasance. Utilizing the World Business Environment Survey on corruption predictability and the Asian Barometer survey on voters’ electoral behaviors, I report empirical evidence that institutionalized corruption promotes greater electoral tolerance of corrupt politicians in Asian democracies. The results hold against a number of robustness checks. The paper thus furthers our understanding of the effect of informal political institutions on corruption voting as well as Asia’s corruption exceptionalism.

What explains the lack of electoral consequences for corrupt politicians? Building on studies of motivated reasoning and asymmetric partisan bias, this article highlights the importance of partisan differences in how voters interpret corruption convictions and make voting decisions. I contend that in post-authoritarian democracies, supporters of authoritarian legacy parties (ALPs) are less likely to punish corrupt copartisan incumbents compared to supporters of other parties faced with equally corrupt copartisan incumbents. While voters of all kinds appear likely to ignore corruption among copartisan incumbents, supporters of authoritarian legacy parties are particularly likely to do so. Using original datasets from South Korea, this study shows empirical evidence of the lack of corruption voting for ALP partisans across three legislative elections. This article further finds partisan discrepancies and a striking lack of corruption voting among authoritarian legacy partisans.

Retrospective voting models assume that offering more information to voters about their incumbents’ performance strengthens electoral accountability. However, it is unclear whether incumbent corruption information translates into higher political participation and increased support for challengers. We provide experimental evidence that such information not only decreases incumbent party support in local elections in Mexico, but also decreases voter turnout and support for the challenger party, as well as erodes partisan attachments. While information clearly is necessary to improve accountability, corruption information is not sufficient because voters may respond to it by withdrawing from the political process. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for studies of voting behavior.

How does mobile broadband internet affect approval of government? Using surveys of 840,537 individuals from 2,232 subnational regions in 116 countries in 2008-2017 from the Gallup World Poll and the global expansion of third generation (3G) mobile networks, we show that an increase in mobile broadband internet access reduces government approval. This effect is present only when the internet is not censored and is stronger when traditional media is censored. This effect is reversed in the few countries with the lowest corruption. 3G helps expose actual corruption in government: revelations of the Panama Papers and corruption incidents translate into higher perceptions of corruption in regions covered by 3G networks. The disillusionment of voters in governments had electoral implications: In Europe, the expansion of mobile broadband internet led to a decrease in the vote shares of incumbent parties and an increase in the vote shares of the antiestablishment populist opposition. The vote shares of the nonpopulist opposition were unaffected by the expansion of 3G networks.

This paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a political agency model with career concerns and endogenous entry of candidates. The data refer to Brazil, where federal transfers to municipal governments change exogenously at given population thresholds, allowing us to implement a regression discontinuity design. The empirical evidence shows that larger transfers increase observed corruption and reduce the average education of candidates for mayor. These and other more specific empirical results are in line with the predictions of the theory.

We show that political institutions affect corruption levels. We use audit reports in Brazil to construct new measures of political corruption in local governments and test whether electoral accountability affects the corruption practices of incumbent politicians. We find significantly less corruption in municipalities where mayors can get reelected. Mayors with reelection incentives misappropriate 27 percent fewer resources than mayors without reelection incentives. These effects are more pronounced among municipalities with less access to information and where the likelihood of judicial punishment is lower. Overall our findings suggest that electoral rules that enhance political accountability play a crucial role in constraining politician's corrupt behavior.

While officials involved in graft, bribery, extortion, nepotism, or patronage typically like keeping their deeds private, the fact that corruption can have serious effects in democracies is no secret. Numerous scholars have brought to light the impact of corruption on a range of economic and political outcomes. One outcome that has received less attention, however, is voter turnout. Do high levels of corruption push electorates to avoid the polls or to turn out in larger numbers? Though of great consequence to the corruption and voterturnout literature, few scholars in either area have tackled this question and none has done so in a broad sample of democracies. This article engages in this endeavor through an analysis of the broadest possible sample of democratic states. Through instrumental variable regression we find that as corruption increases the percentage of voters who go to the polls decreases. Bien que les agents impliqués dans les pots-de-vin, la corruption, l'extorsion, le népotisme, ou le clientélisme aiment naturellement garder leurs actes privés, ce n'est pas un secret que la corruption peut avoir de graves effets dans les démocraties. De nombreux chercheurs ont mis en lumière l'impact de la corruption sur toute une gamme de paramètres économiques et politiques. Un point qui a reçu moins d'attention, cependant, est le taux de participation électorale. Des niveaux de corruption élevés poussent-ils les électeurs à éviter les urnes ou à s'abstenir en grand nombre? Quoique conséquente sur la corruption et le taux de participation électorale, dans la littérature sur le sujet, peu de chercheurs ont abordé cette question et aucun ne l'a fait sur un large échantillon de démocraties. Cet article s'engage dans cet effort par une analyse de l'échantillon le plus large possible d'États démocratiques. À l'aide d'une régression à variable instrumentale, nous constatons que, lorsque la corruption augmente, le pourcentage des électeurs qui votent diminue. Mientras haya funcionarios involucrados en corrupción, soborno, extorsión, nepotismo, o clientelismo típicos, tales como mantener sus cuentas y acciones en privado, no es un secreto que la corrupción es un hecho que puede tener serias consecuencias para las democracias. Numerosos académicos han puesto de manifiesto el impacto de la corrupción en los resultados políticos y económicos. Sin embargo, uno de los efectos que ha recibido menor atención es aquél en la participación electoral. ¿Los altos niveles de corrupción llevan a los electores a evitar las urnas o a asistir en grandes números? A pesar de que existe vasta literatura sobre las consecuencias de la corrupción y sobre el número de votantes, pocos estudios, de ambas áreas, han abordado esta pregunta y ninguno lo ha hecho usando una muestra amplia de democracias. Este artículo se dedica a esta tarea a través de un análisis de la muestra más amplia posible de estados democráticos. Utilizando los instrumentos de la regresión de variables encontramos que a medida que la corrupción aumenta, el porcentaje de votantes que acuden a las urnas disminuye.

This paper uses publicly released audit reports to study the effects of disclosing information about corruption practices on electoral accountability. In 2003, as part of an anticorruption program, Brazil's federal government began to select municipalities at random to audit their expenditures of federally transferred funds. The findings of these audits were then made publicly available and disseminated to media sources. Using a data set on corruption constructed from the audit reports, we compare the electoral outcomes of municipalities audited before versus after the 2004 elections, with the same levels of reported corruption. We show that the release of the audit outcomes had a significant impact on incumbents' electoral performance, and that these effects were more pronounced in municipalities where local radio was present to divulge the information. Our findings highlight the value of having a more informed electorate and the role played by local media in enhancing political selection.

Debate persists on whether voters hold politicians accountable for corruption. Numerous experiments have examined whether informing voters about corrupt acts of politicians decreases their vote share. Meta-analysis demonstrates that corrupt candidates are punished by zero percentage points across field experiments, but approximately 32 points in survey experiments. I argue this discrepancy arises due to methodological differences. Small effects in field experiments may stem partially from weak treatments and noncompliance, and large effects in survey experiments are likely from social desirability bias and the lower and hypothetical nature of costs. Conjoint experiments introduce hypothetical costly trade-offs, but it may be best to interpret results in terms of realistic sets of characteristics rather than marginal effects of particular characteristics. These results suggest that survey experiments may provide point estimates that are not representative of real-world voting behavior. However, field experimental estimates may also not recover the “true” effects due to design decisions and limitations.