Election Fraud or Strategic Voting? Can Second-digit Tests Tell the Difference?” Paper presented at the 2010 Summer Meeting of the Political Methodology

I simulate a mixture process that generates individual preferences that, when aggregated into precincts, have counts whose second significant digits approximately satisfy Benford’s Law. By deriving sincere, strategic, gerrymandered and coerced votes from these preferences under a plurality voting rule, I find that tests based on the second digits of the precinct counts are sensitive to differences in how the counts are derived. The tests can sometimes distinguish coercion from strategic voting and gerrymanders. The tests may be able to distinguish strategic voting according to a party balancing logic from strategic voting due purely to wasted-vote logic, and strategic from nonstrategic voting. These simulation findings are supported by data from federal and state elections in the United States during the 1980s and 2000s