ELECTION FORENSICS TOOLKIT

Current efforts to promote the integrity of elections around the world are multi-pronged. They include promoting the development and capacity of independent election agencies, ballot reform, and on-the-ground monitoring of elections by domestic and foreign observers. Social scientists have been adding to this effort by developing tools and techniques designed to detect the presence of fraud or malfeasance in an election and to estimate its magnitude. Supported by a Research and Innovation Grant from USAID's Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance, this project seeks to harness these efforts to create innovative resources for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars who study and evaluate election outcomes, enabling them to evaluate better the integrity of election returns. One of the primary products is an Election Results Evaluation Tool, a sophisticated data-based instrument for reporting quantitative election forensic results with a user-friendly interface..