Election Fraud and Contested Congressional Elections: An Analysis of the United States, 1840-1940.

Under what conditions do losing candidates file complaints about election fraud? And, what can such complaints teach us about the nature and extension of election fraud? This paper investigates a method for measuring electoral fraud by examining a dataset of challenges over unfair elections filed to the Committee on Elections of the United States House of Representatives between 1840 and 1939. Drawing on a general "calculus of petitions" that can help untangle when contests might be filed, we seek to evaluate the extent to which the analysis of election disputes is a useful method for measuring the incidence of election fraud. We also analyze a variety of hypotheses on the over-time and cross-sectional distribution of election disputes. Overall, the paper seeks to use the American historical case to contribute to the growing comparative politics literature on the causes of election fraud in newly democratizing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]