Election forensics: Using machine learning and synthetic data for possible election anomaly detection.

Journal: PloS one
PMID:

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.

Authors

  • Mali Zhang
    Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States of America.
  • R Michael Alvarez
    Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States of America.
  • Ines Levin
    Department of Political Science, University of California, Irvine, USA. Electronic address: i.levin@uci.edu.