What Does a Crooked Election Look Like?
November 2, 2018
Walter Mebane, a professor of political science and statistics at the University of Michigan and co-author of a 2017 guide to election forensics for the U.S. Agency for International Development, urges caution when attributing election anomalies to possible fraud. “The problem is that many of the patterns that look irregular according to many statistical methods can be produced by strategic behavior, or normal politics,” he says. “You can tell that the pattern was manipulated or looks unusual, but you can’t tell why.”