Abstract

BENESCH, Pedro A. Antenucci  and  PAGE, María. Title 2021 National elections in Argentina: An audit of the provisional ballot. Elecciones [online]. 2023, vol.22, n.26, pp.149-204.  Epub Dec 14, 2023. ISSN 1994-5272.  http://dx.doi.org/10.53557/elecciones.2023.v22n26.05.

The integrity of preliminary vote counts draws increasing attention. Unlike official election results, preliminary vote counts have no legal effect, but their potential impact on public perceptions regarding electoral integrity give grounds for this growing interest. In this article we propose a set of statistical tools to assess the functioning and integrity of preliminary vote counts, and we apply them to analyze the performance of Argentina’s 2021 midterm elections. The proposed techniques measure the coverage and precision of preliminary vote counts, which allows us to detect recurring errors, interferences, or manipulation in preliminary election results. Finally, we show that these tools are sensitive enough to uncover imprecisions or human errors that may occur while filling documents at the polling stations, and when the official results are uploaded.

Keywords : Electoral integrity; preliminary vote counts; election forensics; fraud detection.

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