Max Bader

In recent years there has been increasing attention to the potentially disruptive influence of disinformation on elections. The most common forms of disinformation in elections include the dissemination of ‘fake news’ in order to discredit opponents or to influence the voting process, the falsification or manipulation of polling data, and the use of fake election monitoring and observation. This article presents an overview of the phenomenon of disinformation in elections in both democratic and undemocratic environments, and discusses measures to reduce its scope and negative impact.

The December 2011 legislative election was among the most fraudulent national elections in Russia since the communist period. The fraud, however, was not evenly spread across the country. Precinct-level election returns from the 83 regions of the Russian Federation suggest that the level of fraud ranged from minimal or small in some regions to extreme in some others, with moderate to high fraud levels in many regions in between. We argue that in an electoral authoritarian context like Russia, regional variation in fraud can be explained by differences in (a) the perceived need by regional authorities to signal loyalty to the center by “delivering” desired election results; (b) the capacity of regional authorities to organize fraud; and (c) the vulnerability of citizens to political pressure and manipulation. We test the effect of signaling, capacity, and vulnerability on electoral fraud in the 2011 legislative elections with data on the 83 regions of the Russian Federation. We find evidence for all three mechanisms, finding that the tenure of governors in office, United Russia's dominance in regional legislatures, and the ethnic composition of regions are most important for explaining regional variation in electoral fraud.

It is widely taken for granted that international election observation deters and detects election fraud, but little evidence exists that supports this conventional wisdom. This article employs a unique dataset on the 2011 and 2012 election observation missions by the OSCE to the legislative and presidential elections in Russia, to assess the claim that international election observation deters and detects fraud. The findings suggest that observers may have deterred fraud to some degree during the observation of counting procedures but less so, if at all, during the observation of voting procedures. , and that observers probably did not detect fraud to any significant degree during both voting and counting observations.

The 2011–2012 election cycle in Russia featured an innovation in election monitoring: the crowdsourcing, through the Web-based Karta Narusheniy tool, of information about electoral violations by thousands of individuals across Russia, resulting in a database that contains over 13,000 reports. This study assesses the collective ability of the contributors to the Karta Narusheniy to detect fraud, and looks at what the reports on the Karta Narusheniy reveal about the types and spatial distribution of fraud in the 2011–2012 elections. The article finds that, on the whole, the Karta Narusheniy has been a credible source of information about election fraud. Moreover, the information contained on the Karta Narusheniy, when properly analysed, enhances our insight into how elections in Russia are manipulated.