Strategic Registration of Voters: The Chilean

In this paper we study the incentives for electoral registration in a sys-tem in which registration is costly. We argue that, if the voting behavior of some voters is controllable, then more easily controlled voters are also more likely to be registered resulting in a large impact of vote controlling on election results. Reducing the control on votes (for instance with the adoption of a secret ballot) only partially reduces the bias in registration, as scarcely motivated voters will be always easy to control. We test the predictions of the model by examining in detail the effects of the intro-duction of the secret ballot in Chile in 1958. JEL classification: D72, D82, J41, K39