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In newly stabilizing regimes, why does the practice of elections so often depart from Dahlian (1971) democratic norms? This paper proposes an answer by constructing and analyzing an original dataset drawn from the German parliament’s own voluminous record of election disputes for every parliamentary election in the life of Imperial Germany (1871-1912) after its adoption of universal male suffrage in 1871. The paper analyzes the election of over 5,000 parliamentary seats to identify where and why elections were disputed as a result of “election misconduct. ” The paper argues that electoral fraud is linked to the informal structure of authority in a society, demonstrating that landholding inequality, the hallmark of traditional social power, is significantly related to the incidence of electoral fraud, even controlling for other frequently-cited factors, including the nature of electoral institutions and the competitiveness of elections