Perceptions of electoral integrity

Existing research on election officials, party agents, and non-partisan observers informs the hypotheses on voters’ prospective responses to the presence of each interest group.

Election officials are the administrative personnel sent by EMBs to organize voting at every polling station (ACE, 2012). In Malawi and Kenya, these officials are called “Presiding Officers” (PO) and the majority of people (98% and 97.3%, respectively) know the name and role of their respective EMBs (Afrobarometer, 2021). ^{Footnote 1} The importance of the role suggests that their absence would be a point of concern if interpreted as reduced oversight from a government body. However, not all voters may think this way. Analysis of LatinoBarometer responses to the question “would you say that elections in your country are clean and fair” by Rosas (Reference Rosas2010) indicates that partiality and lack of EMB independence negatively affect perceptions of electoral integrity. Alternatively, PO’s absence may be interpreted as a logistic failure on the part of the EMB, which is associated with lower perceptions of election quality among AfroBarometer respondents (Kerr, Reference Kerr2013). So, while election officials are important, past EMB performance and practices may lead voters to ignore their presence during evaluations of integrity (Erlich and Kerr, Reference Erlich and Kerr2016; Elklit, Reference Elklit2019).

Political party agents protect the interests of candidates by monitoring polling places for faults made during vote counting (ACE, 2012). Ascencio and Rueda (Reference Ascencio and Rueda2019) show that parties strategically allocate their agents to stations where opposition agents will be present, suggesting that party agents play a largely protective role. The shared political identity and interests between voters and their copartisan agents may boost confidence in the validity of results at stations where their party agents are present (Robertson, Reference Robertson2017). However, shared political identity alone may be insufficient in predicting voters’ response to the presence of their party agents. Cantú and García-Ponce (Reference Cantú and García-Ponce2015) used an exit poll of Mexican 2012 elections to evaluate the presence of party agents against a question asking voters about their confidence that their vote will be “respected and counted.” They find a weak, insignificant association, suggesting that voters can be indifferent to party agent presence. So, while there is strong evidence of the importance of partisanship in framing voter evaluations, there is also evidence that partisanship may not be the core basis for how voters respond to partisan monitors.

I adopt the Cantú and García-Ponce (Reference Cantú and García-Ponce2015) intuition (that shared political interest between voters and their copartisan agents matters), but contend that voters may not register the physical presence of agents when voting (Kerr, Reference Kerr2018). I propose using a metric that captures voters’ relative preferences when presented with the option of monitored vs. unmonitored stations, which may yield stronger findings than head counts. Given that partisanship strongly shapes how voters process election information (Edelson et al., Reference Edelson, Alduncin, Krewson, Sieja and Uscinski2017; Anderson et al., Reference Anderson, Blais, Bowler, Donovan and Listhaug2005), I argue that partisan identification will lead voters to prefer results from stations with copartisan agents.

Non-partisan observers are the neutral group between party agents and election officials, who record and report any misconduct in the vote-counting process (Asunka et al., Reference Asunka, Brierley, Golden, Kramon and Ofosu2019). However, we should not assume that the average voter knows about the deterrent role played by observers, especially because non-partisan observers are a recent development relative to representatives of parties and EMBs (Lehoucq, Reference Lehoucq2003). Dawn (Reference Dawn2014) uses a field experiment to show that when provided information about the role of observers, voters tended to rate the election as being more “fair and free.” Work on Tunisia by Bush and Prather (Reference Bush and Prather2018) comparing domestic, regional, and international observers also shows that receiving knowledge about election observers impacts voter perceptions of observers. While Malawi and Kenya host multiple international observer teams, each country has one or two core domestic non-partisan observer organizations providing the majority of observers on election day. ^{Footnote 2}

I posit that the relative novelty of non-partisan observation implies that voter awareness of observer groups is limited (Lehoucq, Reference Lehoucq2003). This intuition is substantiated by preliminary survey findings by Macdonald et al. (Reference Macdonald, Hinfelaar, O’Brien, Jaw and Makokha2022) in Zambia, Kenya, and the Gambia. They found that respondents saw election observation as important, but most respondents needed to be given information about observers first. Notably, few people had knowledge of what observers do or knew the names of any local, regional, or international observer group. The general lack of awareness leads me to expect that people’s knowledge of observer groups strongly conditions their reactions to information about observers.

To study how these personnel shape perceptions of electoral integrity, I use a visual conjoint experiment. Much existing work measures voters’ perceptions of electoral integrity through survey questions often worded: “was X election fair and free.” In asking voters to evaluate an entire election, the response is a respondent’s aggregate evaluation of the election that does not capture: (1) what part(s) of the election cycle are influencing these evaluations and (2) how voters are attributing electoral rights and wrongs for every part of the electoral process. Using the visual conjoint setup allows me to both constrain respondents’ information to station-level activities and compare perceptions across polling actors.

Research design

I take advantage of the format of election forms to narrow the scope of election information being used to make evaluations of integrity. Since election forms contain the names and signatures of all the monitor groups, they provide a micro-level synopsis of the scenario at a given station and usefully accomplish this on an A4-page layout. A standard, fully filled-out vote tally sheet from Malawi can be seen in Figure 1, where: the number of votes for each candidate is highlighted in yellow, the details of political party agents and non-partisan observers are highlighted in blue, and the PO (the election official from the EMB) is circled in red. Similar documents also exist for Kenya. There are a lot of details on the page, so to hone a respondent’s focus on the personnel, a simpler version of the election form was created (Figure 2). It only contains the election information I am interested in manipulating while simulating the format of the original form. ^{Footnote 3}

Figure 1. Example of an actual election form (from Malawi’s 2019 election). Details relevant to the experiment have been highlighted for clarity.

Figure 2. Example of a simplified form (Malawian version) shown during the experiment.

In the context of the conjoint experiment, the presence or absence of a signature on a form (from an agent/election official /observer) is used to imply the presence or absence of their associated interest group. The primary assumption is that voters will interpret the presence/absence of a signature on a form, as the presence/absence of a person. This is a challenge if, for example, a respondent sees a form with a missing signature, but does not interpret it as missing person: e.g. they may assume that their party agent was present, but just forgot to sign the form. I try to overcome this challenge using framing, by telling respondents that a signature is a useful signal that this agent/official/observer was involved during the vote count.

Dependent variable

The outcome variable from this survey is the choice that the respondent makes during the forced-choice experiment. Since respondents have to click on what they believe is the more reliable form, their selection is turned into a binary variable called “chosen.”

After the forced choice, there are also four follow-up questions asking respondents about the reasoning behind their selection (see Table 2).

Table 1. A summary of the conjoint attributes and treatment levels. The Average Marginal Component Effect baseline attribute level is marked with (b). Appendix A2 provides an example of the altered form

Table 2. To what extent

The questions are asked for both forms that were presented in the forced choice. This information is used to understand why respondents may find the presence of an agent/observer/PO salient, providing a secondary source of evidence for the causal pathways between the experimental treatments and forced-choice outcomes.

Why do monitors matter?

Evidently, the presence of each polling station interest group is salient to voters, but not for the reasons suggested by the hypotheses. Respondents with different levels of institutional trust, partisan identities, and knowledge of observer groups display similar preferences in election monitoring. Accounting for the cited measurement caveats, the results suggest that conditioning perceptions of tally reliability on individuals’ characteristics is too deterministic an approach to understanding the logic of voter perceptions of electoral integrity. The effect of poll actor signatures is consistently positive, with range of 10–20 percentage-point increases in respondents’ perception of tally reliability, with effect sizes similar to those in experimental work on perceptions of partisan monitoring in the US by Sheagley and Cohen (Reference Sheagley and Cohen2023).

Interestingly, the strong preference for two partisan agent signatures in Figure 5 highlights a vote preference for more eyes on the poll. This raises the broader question of whether respondents may just be counting signatures, basing their forced-choice selections on the absolute number of people at the station, and not necessarily distinguishing between the individual identities of the poll actors involved. To speak to both the potential complexity of respondent decision-making and evaluate the idea of inattentive respondent behavior, I look at all the conjoint attributes more broadly. I compare all poll actor combinations using the responses from the follow-up questions that asked about people’s reasons for preferring one collection of monitors over another. This is summarized in Figure 7.

Figure 7. Means and standard errors of concern level. The three-digit numbers in the x-axis, reading left to right, signify presiding officer (PO) presence, agent presence, and observer presence. Here, 0 = absent, 1 = present. For party agents specifically, 1 = one agent present and 2 = two different agents present. For example, “021” is: no presiding officer, two agents from opposing parties, and one observer.

Figure 7 highlights that more eyes on the poll do matter, but this is related to the protections conferred by additional poll actors (especially partisan ones), rather than the absolute count of poll actors. Some examples where the counting speculation is challenged are when forms with the same number of monitors yield different integrity outcomes, and also where forms with fewer monitors receive more or equally positive assessments. Notably, forms with only two agents (020) received a similar average rating as a form with a PO, an agent, and an observer (111) – despite the latter having a greater number and diversity of individuals. Additionally forms with only a PO and observer (101), which similarly have only two individuals, were rated almost the same as 020 except for the higher rating for “unprotected party interests,” illustrating a particular respondentʼs sensitivity to the presence and lack of party agents. This aligns with experimental findings by Sheagley and Cohen (Reference Sheagley and Cohen2023), where scenarios in which there is only one, opposing-party agent present are viewed less favorably by respondents than instances where agents from both parties are present. Additionally, these observations both cast doubt on the idea of indifferent respondent behavior and show a sophisticated logic of respondents’ beliefs about the specific protections offered by each interest group. While the gold standard is understandable that all groups are present (121), the variability in the responses to each misconduct concern within and across each combination of polling actors suggests that respondents distinguished between poll monitor identities.