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One Person, One Vote: Estimating the Prevalence of Double Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2020

SHARAD GOEL*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
MARC MEREDITH*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
MICHAEL MORSE*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
DAVID ROTHSCHILD*
Affiliation:
Microsoft Research
HOUSHMAND SHIRANI-MEHR*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
*
*Sharad Goel, Assistant Professor, Department of Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University, scgoel@stanford.edu.
†Marc Meredith, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, marcmere@sas.upenn.edu.
‡Michael Morse, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Government, Harvard University, michaellmorse@g.harvard.edu.
**David Rothschild, Economist, Microsoft Research, davidmr@microsoft.com.
††Houshmand Shirani-Mehr, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University, hshirani@stanford.edu.
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Abstract

Beliefs about the incidence of voter fraud inform how people view the trade-off between electoral integrity and voter accessibility. To better inform such beliefs about the rate of double voting, we develop and apply a method to estimate how many people voted twice in the 2012 presidential election. We estimate that about one in 4,000 voters cast two ballots, although an audit suggests that the true rate may be lower due to small errors in electronic vote records. We corroborate our estimates and extend our analysis using data from a subset of states that share social security numbers, making it easier to quantify who may have voted twice. For this subset of states, we find that one suggested strategy to reduce double voting—removing the registration with an earlier registration date when two share the same name and birthdate—could impede approximately 300 legitimate votes for each double vote prevented.

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Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2020 
Figure 0

FIGURE 1.Example of a Philadelphia Poll Book After an Election

Figure 1

FIGURE 2.Distribution of (Cleaned) Birthdays in 1970 in the National Voter File

Figure 2

FIGURE 3.Examples of Names Among 2012 Voters with a Nonuniform Date of Birth Distribution, by Day (a) or Year (b) of Birth.Note: For example, those with the name June were likely born in the month of June, and those with the name Josefina were likely born on March 19, the associated name day.

Figure 3

FIGURE 4.Modeled Distribution of Birthdays for Voters Born in 1970 for Five Different First Names vs. the Empirical Distribution of Birthdays for Voters with Those First Names (Aggregated Across All Years) and the Empirical Distribution of Birthdays for Voters with Those First Names Born in 1970.Note: Across all years (in 1970), we observe 1,669,641 (39,583) voters named Michael; 894,836 (7,621) voters named Patricia; 60,464 (299) voters named June; 10,956 (120) voters named Autumn; and 7,084 (42) voters named Madeleine.

Figure 4

FIGURE 5.How the Estimated Number of Double Votes Changes Based on the Clerical Error Rate

Figure 5

TABLE 1.Vote Records Among Registration Pairings with Known SSN4s

Supplementary material: Link

Goel et al. Dataset

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Supplementary material: PDF

Goel et al. supplementary material

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