As elections have spread globally, attempts to ensure they are meaningful have also proliferated, but the potential consequences of these efforts remain under-explored. Among such efforts, international and domestic monitoring play a prominent role. Can election monitoring have unintended negative consequences? I will argue that, while election monitoring in general may have great social benefits, the possibility that in some circumstances it may have unintended effects is one that should be kept in mind by policy makers and students of elections. Over the last few decades, organized efforts by non-governmental groups and international organizations to discourage cheating have become the norm. The centerpiece of such efforts, election monitoring, seeks to change the behavior of would-be cheaters, specifically to prevent cheating by rendering it more risky and more costly, ideally, prohibitively so. When cheating can be verified, for instance, redress becomes more plausible, rendering cheating a riskier proposition. But monitoring does not always succeed at discouraging cheating: It can also induce the monitored party to resort to means of manipulating elections that are more difficult to scrutinize, as practitioners and scholars have noted. The consequences of such strategic adaptation for the overall political and economic health of the country being observed have not been fully explored.I will argue that those forms of electoral manipulation that are less amenable to detection and redress through monitoring can also entail an important level of damage to political, legal, and governmental institutions and to media independence. Hence, insofar as monitoring induces the adoption of such forms of electoral manipulation, it can have negative consequences -- unintended, to be sure -- for political and economic well-being. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]