Late-Arriving Votes and Electoral Fraud: A Natural Experiment and Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Bolivia
利用2019年玻利维亚选举中计票系统中断的自然实验，发现迟到的选票存在2.51%的舞弊，足以改变选举结果，为检测选举舞弊提供了识别策略。
This paper uses a unique data set and a natural experiment to test if electoral fraud can exist in late-arriving votes. On the night of the 2019 Bolivian elections, the official vote counting system that was expected to publish the results real-time, suddenly stopped. When it resumed, the results had flipped. We estimate several difference-in-differences specifications using a 2016 referendum and the votes of other political parties. We find that the extent of the fraud is 2.51% of the valid votes, sufficient to change the outcome of the election. Our results are robust to polling-station-level shocks common across 2019 and 2016, as well as 2019 specific shocks. This controls for geography , socioeconomic characteristics, unobserved voting preferences, and endogeneity in the arrival of the polling station results. We report evidence of fraud that occurred before the shutdown and document a statistically significant discontinuous jump in the votes during the shutdown. We provide insights on how to apply our different identification strategies to test for fraud in other elections.