An Institutional Design Approach to Preventing Election Fraud

Abstract

Free and fair elections are essential for good governance and development. There are increasing concerns about the integrity of elections worldwide. The solutions offered in the literature and by the international community to mitigate election fraud focus on election monitoring. We propose a complementary, unexplored approach through institutional design. We identify an electoral design that eliminates election fraud and simultaneously preserves the majoritarian outcome, so that the incumbent wins exactly when a majority supports her. In this design, the electorate is divided into near-identical districts; the incumbent wins the election if she wins a super-majority of districts; and she wins a district if she receives the majority of the district's votes. Requiring the incumbent to win a super-majority of districts amplifies her agents’ coordination problem by inducing mutual fear that others will abandon the incumbent. We highlight multiple directions for future research. Methodologically, our paper advances our understanding of collective agency problems in which mechanism design and coordination are intertwined.

Keywords: Election Fraud, Fraud-proofing, Institutional Design, Global Games, Mechanism Design

JEL Classification: D02, D72, D74, D79, D82, D86, H10, K16