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* Sergio J. Ascencio, Post Doctoral Associate, New York University Abu Dhabi, [email protected]. † Miguel R. Rueda, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Emory University, [email protected].
Previous versions were presented at the 2015 Electoral Integrity Project Workshop, the 2016 Southern Political Science Association meeting, the Comparative Politics workshop at the Universidad de los Andes, the Political Institutions and Methodology talks at Emory University, the 2016 European Political Science Association meeting, and the 2016 Formal Theory and Comparative Politics conference. We thank the audiences and discussants in those venues for their feedback, and, in particular, Horacio Larreguy, Jerey A. Karp, John Marshall, and Benjamin Marx for their thoughtful comments. We also thank four anonymous referees for outstanding feedback. Finally, we thank Abigail Heller and Montserrat Trujillo for their excellent work as research assistants. All remaining errors are our own. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/D7ZXZI.
Political parties compete during elections on the basis of policy platforms, their records of past performance in office, and very frequently, by engaging in electoral irregularities. When engaging in irregularities is the chosen strategy, how do other parties defend themselves from such actions? Although a growing literature has investigated how electoral manipulation occurs, we still do not have answers to this question. The study of electoral manipulation has focused on the decisions made by the party that engages in the irregularities, while giving only a passive role to its competitors. This overlooks the fact that the party that is the victim of manipulation is the actor most interested in counteracting it. In this paper, we address these issues by studying the competitive allocation of resources by parties that seek to prevent and offset electoral irregularities.
We focus on the levels of monitoring chosen by parties that are carried out by their polling station representatives. In many countries, these representatives constitute the first, and sometimes, the only line of defense against ballot stuffing, tampering with ballots, multiple voting, and other election-day irregularities. The importance of their role is recognized by those involved in campaigns where malpractice is common. “A polling station without a representative is a stolen polling station,” declared Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexican presidential candidate, in front of a crowd of followers during the...