A cleaner ballot box

An effort to clean up local elections in Brazil has yielded new evidence about the prevalence of "voter buying" in one of the world's largest democracies. A study co-authored by an MIT political scientist finds that audits of voters reduce the electorate by 12 percentage points in local elections, and lower the chances of mayoral re-election by 18 percentage points. Fraudulent electoral practices are also much more prevalent in small towns than in larger places. While patronage systems are often thought to materially reward existing residents for their votes, such political machines not only "influence actions of the electorate," as the new paper states; they also change the composition of the electorate. In Brazil, contemporary procedures and technology have left political machines unable to invent voters and votes out of thin air. Instead, the electoral subterfuge in question consists of efforts to "import" real voters into places where they do not legally belong, through dubious registration practices. "In Brazil, where they have a good voting system and there is essentially no ballot stuffing, you can still have this other vector for fraud that can have quite large effects on who wins and loses," says F. Daniel Hidalgo, an assistant professor in MIT's Department of Political Science and a co-author of the paper.