Category Archives: election fraud

Voter Confidence and Perceptions of Election Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election

Our Monitoring the Election project has released two briefs, reporting on preliminary results from a national survey of registered voters conducted immediately after the November 3, 2020 Presidential Election.

These two briefs provide a glimpse into how the heated rhetoric about election and voter fraud before and during the general election has been received by the American electorate.

One of these briefs focuses on the general question of voter confidence in the election.

We asked registered voters to answer four questions about their confidence regarding the 2020 presidential election: their confidence that their own ballot was counted as intended (asked to registered voters who cast a ballot), and their confidence that ballots were counted in their county, their state, and across the nation (the latter three asked to all registered voters). The topline results are shown in this graph from the report.

Voter Confidence

As you can see, 90% of voters were confident that their ballot was counted as they intended, which given the heated rhetoric about this election is a remarkable number. It’s also remarkable that about eight of ten registered voters have confidence that votes were counted as intended in their counties and their states. Those are also remarkable numbers, and in my opinion, a strong indication that American voters are overall quite confident that their local and state election administration was handled well in this contested election.

But when we get to the national level, we find that just over a majority of American registered voters (58%) were confident about the administration of this fall’s election, and that 39% lacked confidence (the remaining registered voters didn’t have an opinion). This lower level of confidence about the national administration of the election is concerning.

Digging one layer deeper into the data, we looked at perceptions of confidence by partisanship and presidential vote. We see high levels of confidences for both Republicans and Democrats, and for both those who voted for Trump or Biden. Nearly every Democratic voters (and nearly every Biden voter) in our sample was confidence that their own ballot was counted as intended: 86% of Democrats were confidence, and 97% of Biden voters were confident. Among Republicans confidence in their own vote was high, with 85% of Republicans and 84% of Trump voters confident in their own vote being counted.

But moving to the national level, the sharp degree of partisan polarization in the United States emerges: while many Democratic and Biden voters were confident about the administration of the election nationally (84% among Democrats, and 87% among Biden voters), most Republicans and Trump supporters lacked confidence in the national administration of the election, with 66% of Republican registered voters lacking confidence, and 70% of Trump voters lacking confidence in the national administration of the vote.

The other brief, authored by Yimeng Li, focuses on a number of questions in the survey asking registered voters about their perceptions that various types of election or voter fraud might occur, and also about hacking of the voting technology in the 2020 election. The survey included questions asking whether the respondent thought that various types of election or voter fraud were common or not:

  • Double voting.
  • Stealing or tampering with voted ballots.
  • Voter impersonation.
  • Non-citizen voting.
  • People voting absentee ballots of other voters.
  • Officials changing reported vote counts in a way that is not a true reflection of how the ballots were actually counted.

Yimeng found that there is a sizable proportion of the American electorate that believes that voter or election frauds like these occur or are common. To quote from the report:

There are many registered voters nationally who said that election or voter fraud
is very common (between 12% and 17% for different types of fraud) or occurs
occasionally (15-17%). Ballot stealing or tempering, fraudulent casting of absentee
ballots intended for another person, and non-citizen voting are perceived to be the
top three types of election or voter fraud. Only about half of the voters believe each
of the six types of fraud occurs infrequently or almost never.

Like we saw regarding voter confidence in the 2020 Presidential election, the perceptions of the American electorate are very polarized along partisan lines. Across the six different types of election or voter fraud we asked about in the survey (Table 2 of the brief), we generally see that majorities of Biden voters believe that these types of fraud are infrequent or that they never occur, while majorities of Trump voters believe that these types of fraud are very common or that they occur occasionally.

A good example of this regards non-citizen voting. Sixty-six percent of Biden voters said that non-citizen voting almost never occurs, while another 12% said it occurs infrequently. On the other hand, 35% of Trump voters said that non-citizen voting is very common, and another 25% said that it occurs occasionally. That’s a pretty stark partisan different in perceptions of the incidence of non-citizen votes.

So what does this all mean, in particular for future elections in the United States?

It seems clear from these topline estimates from this survey that the American electorate remains confident that their own votes were counted, and that they are quite confident that votes in their counties and states were counted as intended. Which is a good sign.

But we see much less confidence in the national administration of the election, where opinions are deeply divided on party lines. We also see that a reasonably large segment of the electorate believes that various types of election or voter fraud occur, and that perceptions about the incidence of election fraud are polarized by partisanship.

This indicates that voters are picking up on elite partisan rhetoric about election and voter fraud, which have been going on since 2016, and which of course has intensified in the past few weeks. But does this mean that despite high levels of voter participation in the 2020 presidential election, will those who lack confidence or are concerned with fraud might be less likely to vote in future federal elections (for example, the 2022 and 2024 elections)? Will the lower levels of confidence in the national administration of federal elections, and concerns about election fraud for some segments of the electorate, lead to further erosion of trust in American democratic institutions?

At this point it’s hard to know what might happen. But these survey results provide some cause for concern, and they show that we need to continue our work to inform the American electorate about the integrity of the 2020 presidential election.

We’ll be posting additional briefs from our survey in coming days and weeks on our website.

Election forensics and machine learning

We recently published a new paper on election forensics in PLOS ONE, “Election forensics: Using machine learning and synthetic data for possible election anomaly detection.” . It’s a paper that I wrote with Mali Zhang (a recent PhD student at Caltech), and Ines Levin at UCI. PLOS ONE is an open access journal, so there is no paywall!

Here’s the paper’s abstract:

Assuring election integrity is essential for the legitimacy of elected representative democratic government. Until recently, other than in-person election observation, there have been few quantitative methods for determining the integrity of a democratic election. Here we present a machine learning methodology for identifying polling places at risk of election fraud and estimating the extent of potential electoral manipulation, using synthetic training data. We apply this methodology to mesa-level data from Argentina’s 2015 national elections.

This new PLOS ONE paper advances the paper that Ines and I coauthored with Julia Pomares, “Using machine learning algorithms to detect election fraud”, that appeared in the volume of papers that I edited, Computational Social Science: Discovery and Prediction. This is an area where my research group and some of my collaborators are continuing to work on methodologies to quickly obtain elections data and analyze it for anomalies and outliers, similar to our Monitoring the Election project. More on all of this soon!

The plot thickens: Which Florida counties were targeted by hackers?

Earlier this week I wrote about the recent news that hackers may have gained access to election administration systems in at least one Florida county in 2016: see How to avoid an election meltdown in 2020: Improve voter registration database security and monitoring.

Now in the news are reports that may have been two Florida counties where hackers may have gained access to county election administration system in 2016 (see the NYT story, for example, “Russians Hacked Voter Systems in 2 Florida Counties. But Which Ones?”). This has set off a guessing game — which Florida county election administration systems might have been breached in 2016, and what where the consequences?

I’d like to return attention, though, to what I think is the most important issue here. It’s not whether one or two county systems were breached in 2016, the most important thing is to make sure that as we go into the 2020 election cycle, that security and auditing systems are in place to detect any malicious or accidental manipulations of voter registration databases. It’s now May 2019, and we have plenty of time to evaluate the current security protocols for these critical databases in every state, to improve those protocols where necessary, and to put in place database auditing and monitoring tools like those we have been working on in our Monitoring the Elections project.

Now’s the time to act — while we still can improve the security of voter registration systems, and establish auditing procedures to detect any efforts to manipulate the critical information in those systems.

How to avoid an election meltdown in 2020: Improve voter registration database security and monitoring

One of the most shocking parts of the Mueller report details the widespread efforts by Russian hackers to attack American election infrastructure in 2016.

Specifically, the report presents evidence that the Russian intelligence (GRU) targeted state and local election administration systems, that they have infiltrated the computer network of the Illinois State Board of Elections and at least one Florida County during the 2016 presidential election, using means such as SQL injection and spear phishing. They also targeted private firms that provide election administration technologies, like software systems for voter registration.

This is stunning news, and a wake-up call for improving the integrity and security of election administration and technology in the United States.

The Mueller report does not provide evidence that these hacking attempts altered the reported results of elections in 2016 or 2018. Instead the report highlights hacking efforts aimed at gaining access to voter registration databases, which might seem surprising to many.

Prior to the 2000 presidential election, voter registration data was maintained in a hodgepodge of ways by county and state election officials. After the passage of the Help America Vote Act in 2002, states were required to centralize voter registration data in statewide electronic databases, to improve the accuracy and accessibility of voter registration data in every state.

But one consequence of building statewide voter registration datasets is that they became attractive targets for hackers. Rather than targeting hundreds or thousands of election administration systems at the county level, hackers can now target a single database system in every state.

Why would hackers want to target voter registration systems?

First, a hacker could alter registration records in a state or county, or delete records, with the goal being to wreak havoc on Election Day. By dropping voters, or by changing voter addresses, names, or partisan affiliations, a hacker could create chaos on Election Day—for instance, voters could go to the right polling place, only to find that their name is not on the roster, and thus be denied the chance to vote.

A hack of this type, if done in a number of counties in a battleground state like Florida, could lead to an election meltdown like we saw in the 2000 presidential election.

Second, a hacker could be more systematic in their efforts. They could add fake voters to the database, and if they had access to the electronic systems used to send absentee ballots, get access to ballots for these fake voters.

This type of hack could enable a large-scale effort to actually change the outcome of an election, if the hackers marked and returned the ballots for these fake voters.

These vulnerabilities are real, and an unintended consequence of the development of centralized electronic statewide voter registration databases in the United States. There is little doubt that the attempts by hackers to target voter registration systems in 2016 and 2018 could have produced widespread disruption of either election, had they been successful.

There is also little doubt that efforts to hack voter registration databases in the United States will continue. The GRU will have better knowledge as to what vulnerabilities exist in our election systems and how to target them. What can we do to secure these databases, to prevent these attacks and to make sure that we can detect them if hackers gain access to registration databases?

Obviously, state and county election officials must continue their efforts to solidify the security of voter registration databases. They must also continue their efforts to make sure that strong electronic security practices are in place, to make sure that hackers cannot gain access to passwords and other administrative systems they might exploit to gain access to registration data.

There are further steps that can be taken by election officials to secure registration data.

In a pilot project that we at Caltech have conducted with the Orange County (California) Registrar of Voters, we built a set of software applications that monitor the County’s database of registered voters for anomalies. This pilot project was financially supported by a research grant to Caltech from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. Details are available on the project’s website.

Working with the Registrar, we began getting daily snapshots of the County’s dataset of about 1.5 million registered voters about a year ago. We run our algorithms to look for anomalous changes in the database. Our algorithms can detect situations when unexpectedly large numbers of records are removed or added, and when unexpectedly large numbers of records are being changed. Thus, our algorithms can detect attempts to manipulate voter registration data.

After running our algorithms, we produce detailed reports that we send to the Registrar, letting them know if we see anomalies that require further investigation. We have developed other data-driven tools to monitor the 2018 elections in Orange County, looking at voting-by-mail patterns, turnout, and social media mentions. The results of this comprehensive monitoring appear on our pilot project’s website, providing transparency that we believe helps voters and stakeholders remain confident that the County’s voter registration data is secure.

This type of database and election system monitoring is critical for detecting and mitigating attempts to hack an election. It also helps isolate other issues that might occur in the administration of an election. By finding problems quickly, election officials can resolve them. By making the results of our monitoring available to the public, voters and stakeholders can be assured in the integrity of the election.

We are now working to build similar collaborations with other state and county election officials, to provide independent third-party monitoring of registration databases, and other related election administration infrastructure. Not only is it critical for election officials to monitor their data systems to make sure they have a high degree of integrity, it is also important that the public know that registration data is being monitored and is secure.

New developments in the fight on election interference

There is a news report today that in last fall’s midterm elections, the U.S. Cyber Command and the NSA worked to take Russian cyber-trolls offline. It’s an interesting new development in the continuing fight against interference in U.S. elections. Here’s a link to the Washington Post story, and here’s the summary:

The strike on the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, a company underwritten by an oligarch close to President Vladi­mir Putin, was part of the first offensive cyber-campaign against Russia designed to thwart attempts to interfere with a U.S. election, the officials said.

“They basically took the IRA offline,” according to one individual familiar with the matter who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information. “They shut them down.”

Interesting development in the continuing struggle to fight cyber interference in elections.

Let’s not forget the voters

Recently my colleague and co-blogger, Charles Stewart, wrote a very interesting post, “Voters Think about Voting Machines.” His piece reminds me of something a point that Charles and I have been making for a long time — that election officials should focus attention on the opinions of voters in their jurisdictions. After all, those voters are one of the primary customers for the administrative services that election officials provide.

Of course, there are lots of ways that election officials can get feedback about the quality of their administrative services, ranging from keeping data on interactions with voters to doing voter satisfaction and confidence surveys.

But as election officials throughout the nation think about upcoming technological and administrative changes to the services they provide voters, they might consider conducting proactive research, to determine in advance of administrative or technological change what voters think about their current service, to understand what changes voters might want, and to see what might be causing their voters to desire changes in administrative services or voting technologies.

This is the sort of question that drove Ines Levin, Yimeng Li, and I to look at what might drive voter opinions about the deployment of new voting technologies in our recent paper, “Fraud, convenience, and e-voting: How voting experience shapes opinions about voting technology.” This paper was recently published in American Politics Research, and we use survey experiments to try to determine what factors seem to drive voters to prefer certain types of voting technologies over others. (For readers who cannot access the published version at APR, here is a pre-publication version at the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project’s website.)

Here’s the abstract, summarizing the paper:

In this article, we study previous experiences with voting technologies, support for e-voting, and perceptions of voter fraud, using data from the 2015 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. We find that voters prefer systems they have used in the past, and that priming voters with voting fraud considerations causes them to support lower-tech alternatives to touch-screen voting machines — particularly among voters with previous experience using e-voting technologies to cast their votes. Our results suggest that as policy makers consider the adoption of new voting systems in their states and counties, they would be well-served to pay close attention to how the case for new voting technology is framed.

This type of research is quite valuable for election officials and policy makers, as we argue in the paper. How administrative or technological change is framed to voters — who are the primary consumers of these services and technologies — can really help to facilitate the transition to new policies, procedures, and technologies.

“Fraud, convenience, and e-voting”

Ines Levin, Yimeng Li, and I, recently published our paper “Fraud, convenience, and e-voting: How voting experience shapes opinions about voting technology” in the Journal of Information Technology and Politics. Here’s the paper’s abstract:

In this article, we study previous experiences with voting technologies, support for e-voting, and perceptions of voter fraud, using data from the 2015 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. We find that voters prefer systems they have used in the past, and that priming voters with voting fraud considerations causes them to support lower-tech alternatives to touch-screen voting machines — particularly among voters with previous experience using e-voting technologies to cast their votes. Our results suggest that as policy makers consider the adoption of new voting systems in their states and counties, they would be well-served to pay close attention to how the case for new voting technology is framed.

The substantive results will be of interest to researchers and policymakers. The methodology we use — survey experiments — should also be of interest to those who are trying to determine how to best measure the electorate’s opinions about potential election reforms.

Report on “Voter Fraud” Rife With Inaccuracies

I look forward to a more detailed analysis by voter registration and database match experts of the GAI report that will be presented to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity , but even a cursory reading reveals a number of serious misunderstandings and confusions that call into question that authors’ understanding of some of the most basic facts about voter registration, voting, and elections administration in the United States.

Fair warning: I grade student papers as part of my job, and one of the comments I make most often is “be precise”. Categories and definitions are fundamentally important, especially in a highly politicized environment like that current surrounding American elections.

The GAI report is far from precise; it’s not a stretch to say at many points that it’s sloppy and misinformed. I worry that it’s purposefully misleading. Perhaps I overstate the importance of some of the mistakes below. I leave that for the reader to judge.

  • The report uses an overly broad and inaccurate definition of vote fraud.

American voter lists are designed to tolerate invalid voter registration records, which do not equate to invalid votes, because to do otherwise would lead to eligible voters being prevented from casting legal votes.

But the report follows a very common and misleading attempt to conflate errors in the voter rolls with “voter fraud”. Read their “definition”:

Voter fraud is defined as illegal interference with the process of an election. It can take many forms, including voter impersonation, vote buying, noncitizen voting, dead voters, felon voting, fraudulent addresses, registration fraud, elections officials fraud, and duplicate voting.8

Where did this definition come from? As the source of the definition, they cite the Brennan Center report “The Truth About Voter Fraud” (https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/The%20Truth%20About%20Voter%20Fraud.pdf). 

However, the Brennan Center authors are very careful to define voter fraud. From Pg. 4 of their report in a way that directly warns against an overly broad and imprecise definition:

Voter fraud” is fraud by voters. More precisely, “voter fraud” occurs when individuals cast ballots despite knowing that they are ineligible to vote, in an attempt to defraud the election system.1

This sounds straightforward. And yet, voter fraud is often conflated, intentionally or unintentionally, with other forms of election misconduct or irregularities.

To be fair to the authors, they do not conflate in their analysis situations such as being registered in two places at once with “voter fraud”, but the definition is sloppy, isn’t supported by the report they cite, and reinforces a highly misleading claim that voter registration errors are analogous to voter fraud.

David Becker can describe ad nauseam how damaging this misinterpretation has been.

  • The report makes unsubstantiated claims about the efficacy of Voter ID in preventing voter fraud.

Regardless of how you feel about voter ID, if you are going to claim that voter ID prevents in-person vote fraud, you need to provide actual proof, not just a supposition. The report authors write:

GAI also found several irregularities that increase the potential for voter fraud, such as improper voter registration addresses, erroneous voter roll birthdates, and the lack of definitive identification required to vote.

The key term here is “definitive identification”, a term that appears nowhere in HAVAThe authors either purposely or sloppily misstate the legal requirements of HAVA.  On pg. 20 of the report, they write that HAVA has a

“requirement that eligible voters use definitive forms of identification when registering to vote”

The word “definitive” appears again, and a bit later in the paragraph, it appears that a “definitive” ID, according to the authors, is:

“Valid drivers’ license numbers and the last four digits of an individual’s social security number…”,

But not according to HAVA. HAVA requirements are, as stated in the report:

“Alternative forms of identification include state ID cards, passports, military IDs, employee IDs, student IDs, bank statements, utility bills, and pay stubs.”

The rhetorical turn occurs at the end of the paragraph, when the authors conclude that these other forms of ID are:

“less reliable than the driver’s license and social security number standard”. This portion of the is far from precise.

and apparently not “definitive” and hence prone to fraud.

Surely the authors don’t intend to imply that a passport is “less reliable” than a drivers license and social security number. In many (most?) states, a “state ID card” is just as reliable as a drivers license. I’m not familiar with the identification requirements for a military ID—perhaps an expert can help out?[ED NOTE: I am informed by a friend that a civilian ID at the Pentagon requires a retinal scan and fingerprints]–but are military IDs really less “definitive” than a driver’s license?

If you are going to claim that voter fraud is an issue requiring immediate national attention, and that states are not requiring “definitive” IDs, you’d better get some of the most basic details of the most basic laws and procedures correct.

  • The authors claim states did not comply with their data requests, when it appears that state officials were simply following state law

The authors write:

(t)he Help America Vote Act of 2002 mandates that every state maintains a centralized statewide database of voter registrations.14

That’s fine, but the authors seem to think this means that HAVA requires that the states make this information available to researchers at little to no cost. Anyone who has worked in this field knows that many states have laws that restrict this information to registered political entities. Most states restrict the number of data items that can be released in the interests of confidentiality.

Rather than acknowledging that state officials are constrained by state law, the authors claim non-compliance:

In effect, Massachusetts and other states withhold this data from the public.

I can just hear the gnashing of teeth in the 50 state capitols.I am sympathetic with the authors’ difficulties in obtaining statewide voter registration and voter history files. Along with the authors, I would like to see all state files be available for a low or modest fee, and to researchers.

There is no requirement that the database be made available for an affordable fee, nor that the database be available beyond political entitles.  These choices are left to the states.  it is wrong to charge “non-compliance” when an official is following statute (passed by their state legislatures).

I don’t know whether the report authors didn’t have subject matter knowledge or were purposefully trying to create a misleading image of non-cooperation with the Commission.

  • The report shows that voter fraud is nearly non-existent, while simultaneously
    claiming the problem requires “immediate attention”.

But let’s return to the bottom line conclusion of the report: voter fraud is pervasive enough to require “immediate attention.” Do their data support this claim?

The most basic calculation would be the rate of “voter fraud” as defined in the report The 45,000 figure (total potential illegally cast ballots) is highly problematic, based on imputing from suspect calculations in 21 states, then imputed to 29 other states without considering even the most basic rules of statistical calculation.

Nonetheless, even if you accept the calculation, it translates into a “voter fraud” rate of 0.000323741007194 (45,000 / 139 million), or three thousandths of a percent.

This is almost exactly the probability that you will be struck across your whole lifetime (a chance of 1 in 3000 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0623_040623_lightningfacts.html)

I’m not the first one to notice this comparison—see pg. 4 of the Brennan Center report cited below. And here I thought I found something new!

There are many, many experts in election sciences and election administration that could have helped the Commission conduct a careful scientific review of the probability of duplicate registration and duplicate voting.  This report, written by Lorraine Minnite more than a decade ago lays out precisely the steps that need to be taken to uncover voter fraud and how statewide voter files should be used in this effort. There are many others in the field including those worried about voter fraud and those who are skeptics of voter fraud who have been calling for just such a careful study.

Unfortunately, the Commission instead chose to consult a “consulting firm” with no experience in the field, and which chose to consult database companies who also had no expertise in the field.

I’m sure that other experts will examine in more detail the calculations about duplicate voting. However, at first look, the report fails the smell test. It’s a real stinker.

—
Paul Gronke
Professor, Reed College
Director, Early Voting Information Center

http://earlyvoting.net

Media exit polls, election analytics, and conspiracy theories

The integrity of elections is a primary concern in a democratic society. One of the most important developments in the study of elections in recent decades has been the rapid development of tools and methods for evaluation of elections, most specifically, what many call “election forensics.” I and a number of my colleagues have written extensively on election evaluation and forensics; I refer interested readers to the book that Lonna Atkeson, Thad Hall, and I wrote, Evaluating Elections, and to the book that I edited with Thad and Susan Hyde, Election Fraud.

One question that continues to arise concerns whether observed differences between election results and media exit polls is evidence of electoral manipulation or election fraud. These questions have been raised in a number of recent U.S. presidential elections, and have come up again in the recent presidential primary elections in the U.S. In a recent piece in the New York Times, Nate Cohn wrote about these claims, and why we should be cautious in the use of media exit polls to detect election fraud. Each of the points that Cohn makes is valid and important, so this is an article worth reading closely.

I’d add to Cohn’s arguments, and note that while media exit polls have clear weaknesses as the sole forensic tool for determining the integrity of an election, we have a wide variety of other tools and methods to use in situations where there are questions raised about an election.
As Lonna, Thad and I wrote in Evaluating Elections, a good post-election study of an election’s integrity should involve a variety of data sources and multiple methods: including surveys and polls, post-election audits, and forensic analysis of disaggregated election returns. Each analytic approach has it’s strengths and weaknesses (media exit polls included), so by approaching the study of election integrity using as many data sources and different methods as we can, we can best locate where we might want to launch further investigation of potential problems in an election.

I have no doubt that we will hear more about the use of exit polls to evaluate the integrity of the presidential election this fall. Keep in mind Cohn’s cautionary points about using exit polls for this purpose, and also keep in mind that there are many other ways to evaluate the integrity of an election that have been tested and used in past elections. Media exit polls aren’t a great forensic tool, as Cohn argues: the types of exit polls that the news media uses to make inferences about voting behavior are not designed to detect election fraud or manipulation. Rather, those interested in a detailed examination of an election’s integrity should instead use the full array of analytic forensic tools that have been developed and tested in the research literature.

Virtual Issue of Political Analysis: Election Fraud and Electoral Integrity

Political Analysis has just published a virtual issue on Election Fraud and Electoral Integrity, edited by Ines Levin and myself.

The virtual issue contains a number of papers published recently in Political Analysis, on the forensics of election fraud and on how to study electoral outcomes.

The virtual issue’s papers are freely available for a limited time, as is the the introduction that Ines and I wrote.