This paper explores the relationship between malapportionment and blatant electoral fraud. Although blatant electoral fraud enables incumbents to win elections, it may undermine legitimacy and provoke protests. Malapportionment also helps the incumbent succeed by assigning larger portions of seats to party strongholds, yet its key features differ from electoral fraud. Because malapportionment neither involves coercion nor overt fraud, it is less likely to be followed by reactionary protests. But, it is an inflexible electioneering strategy, because reapportionment leads to difficult coordination problems among ruling legislators. Cross-national statistical analyses of 98 countries (1993–2012) show that, although malapportionment does not affect whether leaders use election violence and electoral cheating, political leaders become less dependent upon the simultaneous use of these fraudulent strategies when high levels of malapportionment are already endowed. The results suggest that although governments might continue to use specific types of blatant electoral fraud even when the levels of malapportionment are high, malapportionment allows governments to be more selective with combining different methods of blatant electoral fraud.

Incumbents have many tools to tip elections in their favor, yet little is known about how they choose between strategies. By comparing various tactics, this article argues that electoral malpractice centered on manipulating institutions offers the greatest effectiveness while shielding incumbents from public anger and criminal prosecution. To demonstrate this, the study focuses on a widespread institutional tactic: preventing candidates from accessing the ballot. First, in survey experiments, Russian voters respond less negatively to institutional manipulations, such as rejecting candidates, than to blatant fraud, such as ballot box stuffing. Next, using evidence from 25,935 Russian mayoral races, the article shows that lower societal and implementation costs enable incumbents to strategically reject candidacies from credible challengers and then reduce their electoral vulnerability. In all, the technology behind specific manipulations helps determine when and how incumbents violate electoral integrity.

Does electoral fraud stabilize authoritarian rule or undermine it? The answer to this question rests in part on how voters evaluate regime candidates who engage in fraud. Using a survey experiment conducted after the 2016 elections in Russia, the authors find that voters withdraw their support from ruling party candidates who commit electoral fraud. This effect is especially large among strong supporters of the regime. Core regime supporters are more likely to have ex ante beliefs that elections are free and fair. Revealing that fraud has occurred significantly reduces their propensity to support the regime. The authors’ findings illustrate that fraud is costly for autocrats not just because it may ignite protest, but also because it can undermine the regime’s core base of electoral support. Because many of its strongest supporters expect free and fair elections, the regime has strong incentives to conceal or otherwise limit its use of electoral fraud.

What are the characteristics of pre-democratic elections? This article seeks to answer this question by analysing the Brazilian First Republic. Through an original assessment of formal complaints filed by defeated candidates in federal elections, we show that (1) political conflicts were intense and electoral fraud was a consequence of parties’ inability to monopolise the administrative machine in charge of conducting elections; (2) elections were organised by state-level parties, but voting practices were confined to local environments; and (3) voters were mobilised collectively, not individually. These three factors should be taken into account in future research on elections before democracy.

Studies of electoral fraud tend to focus their analyses only on the pre-electoral or electoral phases. By examining the Brazilian First Republic (1889–1930), this article shifts the focus to a later phase, discussing a particular type of electoral fraud that has been little explored by the literature, namely, that perpetrated by the legislatures themselves during the process of giving final approval to election results. The Brazilian case is interesting because of a practice known as degola (‘beheading’) whereby electoral results were altered when Congress decided on which deputies to certify as duly elected. This has come to be seen as a widespread and standard practice in this period. However, this article shows that this final phase of rubber-stamping or overturning election results was important not because of the number of degolas, which was actually much lower than the literature would have us believe, but chiefly because of their strategic use during moments of political uncertainty. It argues that the congressional certification of electoral results was deployed as a key tool in ensuring the political stability of the Republican regime in the absence of an electoral court.