Detecting Manipulation in U.s. House Elections
نویسنده
چکیده
A fundamental tenent of representative democracy is that votes should be counted in a fair and unbiased manner. Contrary to this premise I nd that in U.S. House elections this is not the case. I employ a novel approach to detect electoral manipulation by looking at extremely close elections where the outcome between any two candidates should be random. I nd that in extremely close elections the incumbent wins markedly more often than would be expected. This suggests that the vote counting process is biased in favor of incumbents in a manner that is independent of the underlying incumbency advantage.
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