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Political Science 485-001: Election Forensics

Fall 2025
Monday, Wednesday 1–2:30 (1339 MH)
Professor: Walter R. Mebane, Jr.
Office: 7735 Haven Hall; email wmebane@umich.edu
Office hours: Wed 3–5 or other times by appointment.
Course web page: in Canvass; syllabus also at http://www.umich.edu/~wmebane/ps485.html

Assignment Due Dates
due date description weight
Oct 8 midterm exam 25%
Nov 12 eforensics exercise due 10%
Nov 21 proposal for final paper (see file fpaper.pdf) 5%
Dec 10, noon final paper (see file fpaper.pdf) 30%
— participation 5%
Dec 12, 1:30pm–3:30pm final exam 25%

Reading Availability

The primary source for reading and lectures in this course is my book MS, “Election Forensics: A Finite Mixture Model that Estimates Realized Election Frauds,” which is in EFbook.pdf (version of August 23, 2025) posted at the Canvas course site.

Other material refers to journal articles and papers posted on the Canvas course site. Other articles are easily found via Google or in https://www.jstor.org/ (use University of Michigan Ann Arbor login) or https://lib.umich.edu/. In the following listing, required reading is preceded by a bullet. Other items are recommended.

Class meeting and reading schedule

  1. introduction (Aug 25–27)

    Challú, Cristian, Enrique Seira and Alberto Simpser. 2020. “The Quality of Vote Tallies: Causes and Consequences.” American Political Science Review doi:10.1017/S0003055420000398, pp. 1–15. (in file quality_of_vote_tallies_causes_and_consequences.pdf)

  2. the US in 2000 (Sep 3–8)

    Hasen, Richard L. 2004. “A Critical Guide to Bush v. Gore Scholarship,” Annual Review of Political Science 7: 297–313. http://ssrn.com/abstract=491326

    Toobin, Jeffrey. 2001. Too Close to Call. New York: Random House.

    Kirk Wolter, Diana Jergovic, Whitney Moore, Joe Murphy, Colm O'Muircheartaigh. 2003. “Reliability of the uncertified ballots in the 2000 presidential election in Florida.” The American Statistician 57 (1): 1-14.

    Walter R. Mebane, Jr., and Jasjeet S. Sekhon. 2004. “Robust Estimation and Outlier Detection for Overdispersed Multinomial Models of Count Data.” American Journal of Political Science 48 (April): 392–411.

  3. Russia 2011 and 2012 (Sep 10)

  4. strategic behavior (Sep 15–17)

    Riker, William H. 1982. “The Two-Party System and Duverger's Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science.” American Political Science Review, 76 (Dec.): 753–766. (in file riker.apsr1982.pdf)

    Craven, John. 1992. Social Choice: A Framework for Collective Decisions and Individual Judgements. Cambridge UP. Chapters 2 and 3 and pages 67-74 (sections 5.1–5.2). (in file Craven23.pdf)

    Cox, Gary. 1996. Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral System. Cambridge.

    Riker, William H. 1986. The Art of Political Manipulation. Yale UP.

    Riker, William H. 1982. Liberalism Against Populism: A Confrontation Between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.

    Saari, Donald. 2001. Decisions and elections: explaining the unexpected. Cambridge.

    Alesina, Alberto, and Howard Rosenthal. 1995. Partisan Politics, Divided Government, and the Economy. New York: Cambridge UP.

    Alberto Alesina, John Londregan and Howard Rosenthal. 1993. A Model of the Political Economy of the United States American Political Science Review 87 (Mar): 12–33.

    Mebane, Walter R., Jr., and Jasjeet S. Sekhon. 2002. “Coordination and Policy Moderation at Midterm.” American Political Science Review 96 (March): 141–157. MS version available at http://www.umich.edu/~wmebane/midterm.pdf

    Walter R. Mebane, Jr., Samuel Baltz and Fabricio Vasselai. 2019. “Using Agent-Based Models to Simulate Strategic Behavior in Elections.” (in file pm19.pdf).

  5. eforensics basics (Sep 22–24)

  6. realized frauds compared to procedural frauds: Mexico 2006 and France 2017 (Sep 29–Oct 1)

  7. eforensics and strategic behavior (Oct 6)

  8. midterm exam (Oct 8)

  9. the US in 2004: lost votes and strategic behavior (Oct 15–20)

  10. lost votes (Oct 22–27)

  11. more eforensics: magnitudes and multimodality (Oct 29–Nov 3)

  12. eforensics underestimates realized frauds: Russia 2011 and 2012+ (Nov 5)

  13. eforensics exercise due (Nov 12)

  14. president elections in the US in 2000, 2016, 2020 and 2024 (Nov 10–17)

  15. project work (Nov 19)

  16. proposal due for final paper (see file fpaper.pdf) (Nov 21)

    election monitoring organizations (examples).
    http://www.umich.edu/~wmebane/ps485/monitoring.html

  17. mixture probabilities on the boundary (Nov 24 and Dec 1)

  18. Kenya whistleblower (Dec 3)

  19. other tests (Dec 8)

    Arturas Rozenas. 2017. “Detecting Election Fraud from Irregularities in Vote-Share Distributions.” Political Analysis 25 (1): 41–56. (in file fraud_detectionPA2017.pdf)

    Pericchi, Luis Raúl and David Torres. 2011. “Quick Anomaly Detection by the Newcomb-Benford Law, with Applications to Electoral Processes Data from the USA, Puerto Rico and Venezuela.” Statistical Science 26 (Nov, 4): 502–516. (in file STS0703-006R4A0.pdf).

    Mebane, Walter R., Jr. 2014. “Can Votes Counts' Digits and Benford's Law Diagnose Elections?” In Steven J. Miller, The Theory and Applications of Benford's Law, Princeton UP, 206–216. (in file miller13.pdf).

    Mebane. 2010. “Fraud in the 2009 Presidential Election in Iran?” Chance 23 (Mar.): 6–15. (in file CHANCE 23.1 - Mebane.pdf).

    Hyde, Susan D. 2007. “The Observer Effect in International Politics: Evidence from a Natural Experiment.” World Politics 60 (Oct.): 37–63. (in file hyde.wp2007.pdf)

    Walter R. Mebane, Jr., and Kirill Kalinin 2015. “Election Forensics Toolkit.” http://electionforensics.ddns.net:3838/test/ ; see also https://electionforensics.cps.isr.umich.edu/

    Francisco Cantu and Sebastian M. Saleigh. 2011. “Fraudulent Democracy? An Analysis of Argentina's Infamous Decade using Supervised Machine Learning.” Political Analysis 19 (4): 409–433. (in file Political Analysis-2011-Cantú-409-33.pdf)

    Rundlett, Ashlea and Milan W. Svolik. 2016. “Deliver the Vote! Micromotives and Macrobehavior in Electoral Fraud.” American Political Science Review 110 (1): 180-197. (in file rundlett.svolic.apsr2016.pdf)

    Mebane. 2007. “Election Forensics: Statistics, Recounts and Fraud,” Presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 12–16. http://www.umich.edu/~wmebane/mw07.pdf

    Beber, Bernd and Alexandra Scacco. 2012. What the Numbers Say: A Digit-Based Test for Election Fraud Political Analysis 20 (2): 211–234.
    (in file Political Analysis-2012-Beber-211-34.pdf)

    Kirill Kalinin and Walter R. Mebane, Jr. 2017. “Worst Election Ever in Russia?” Presented at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 6–9. (in file mw17C.pdf)

    Wendy K. Tam Cho and Brian J. Gaines. 2007. “Breaking the (Benford) Law: Statistical Fraud Detection in Campaign Finance.” The American Statistician, 61 (August): 218–223.

    Mebane. 2008. “Election Forensics: The Second-digit Benford's Law Test and Recent American Presidential Elections.” In R. Michael Alvarez, Thad E. Hall and Susan D. Hyde, eds., Election Fraud: Detecting and Deterring Electoral Manipulation. Washington, DC: Brookings Press, 2008, pp. 162–181.
    http://www.umich.edu/~wmebane/fraud06.pdf

    Mebane. 2006. “Election Forensics: Vote Counts and Benford's Law,” Presented at at the 2006 Summer Meeting of the Political Methodology Society, UC-Davis, July 20–22.
    http://www.umich.edu/~wmebane/pm06.pdf

    Kirill Kalinin. 2017. “The Essays on Election Fraud in Authoritarian Regimes: III. Theory of Loyalty: Signaling Games of Election Frauds,” Ph.D. dissertation.
    (in file dissc_final_Walter.pdf)

    Mali Zhang, R. Michael Alvarez and Ines Levin. 2019. “Election Forensics: Using Machine Learning and Synthetic Data for Possible Election Anomaly Detection.” PLOS ONE 14(10):e0223950. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/12/19/1206770110.full.pdf (in file Election_forensics_Using_machine_learning_and_synt.pdf)

    Inès Levin, Gabe A. Cohn, Peter C. Ordeshook, and R. Michael Alvarez. 2009. “Detecting Voter Fraud in an Electronic Voting Context: An Analysis of the Unlimited Reelection Vote in Venezuela.” 2009 Electronic Voting Technology Workshop/Workshop on Trustworthy Elections, Montreal, August 10–11. (in file levin.pdf and at http://www.usenix.org/event/evtwote09/tech/full_papers/levin.pdf

    Peter Ordeshook, Mikhail Myagkov and Dmitry Shakin. 2009. The Forensics of Election Fraud.

    Susan D. Hyde and Nikolay Marinov. 2012. “Which Elections Can Be Lost?” Political Analysis 20 (2): 191–210. (in file Political Analysis-2012-Hyde-191-210.pdf)

    Susan D. Hyde. 2011. The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma: Why Election Observation Became an International Norm. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP.

    Bjornlund, Eric C. 2004. Beyond Free and Fair: Monitoring Elections and Building Democracy. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.

    Judith G. Kelley. 2012. Monitoring Democracy: When International Election Observation Works, and Why It Oftern Fails. Princeton UP.

    Pippa Norris. 2014. Why Electoral Integrity Matters. Cambridge.

    Ali Ansari, Daniel Berman and Thomas Rintoul. 2009. Preliminary Analysis of the Voting Figures in Iran's 2009 Presidential Election. Chatham House, London. June 21, 2009. (in file 14234_iranelection0609.pdf)

    Reza Esfandiari and Yousef Bozorgmehr. 2009. “A Rejoinder to the Chatham House report on Iran's 2009 presidential election offering a new analysis on the results.” (in file Iranian election.pdf)

    Walter R. Mebane, Jr., and Jonathan Wall. 2015. “Election Frauds, Postelection Legal Challenges and Geography in Mexico.” Presented at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, CA, September 3–6, 2015. http://www.umich.edu/~wmebane/apsa15.pdf

    Joseph L. Klesner. 2007. The July 2006 Presidential and Congressional Elections in Mexico. Electoral Studies 26 (Dec 4): 803–808. (in file klesner.es2007.pdf)

    McCann, James A. and Jorge I. Domínguez. 1998. Mexicans React to Electoral Fraud and Political Corruption: an Assessment of Public Opinion and Voting Behavior. Electoral Studies 17 (Dec 4): 483–503. (in file mccann.dominguez.es1998.pdf)

    European Union Election Observation Mission. “Mexico Final Report, Presidential and Parliamentary Elections, 2 July 2006.” November 23, 2006.
    (in file 2006_24_11_final_report_mexico.pdf)


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