Weidmann looks at Afghan election fraud

Wilson School postdoctoral researcher Nils Weidmann has uncovered substantial evidence of voter fraud in last August’s presidential election in Afghanistan. And he didn’t have to interview a single Afghan voter.

Weidmann, a researcher in the Wilson School’s Empirical Studies of Conflict project, studies issues related to geography, territoriality and conflict at different scales. His most recent project mapped election fraud attempts in Afghanistan in an attempt to disentangle the relationship between violence and political participation.

“The goal [of these studies] is to discover where and how election fraud happens,” Weidmann said, using voter data from Afghanistan’s most dangerous areas to analyze “the impact of political violence on turnout.”

For his study, Weidmann utilized a technique recently developed by NYU political scientists Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco ’99, which analyzes the last digit of the total number of votes recorded at individual polling places.

In a fairly conducted election, an even distribution is expected among all integers from 0 to 9, Weidman said. But in Afghanistan, he noticed a high proportion of vote counts ending in the digit zero. He also found an abnormally high frequency of the number 600.

Weidmann observed the greatest frequencies of vote counts ending in zero, especially 600, came from the most dangerous places in Afghanistan. This led him to believe that these vote counts were “systematically modified.”

The voting data Weidmann used for his study came from the website of the Independent Electoral Commission of Afghanistan, the principal agency that monitored the election. Weidmann developed a program to extract the information from the website for his analysis.

Weidmann said he believes that he has produced a credible election-monitoring model based on Scacco and Beber’s techniques. The professors tested their technique last year by comparing vote counts in Nigeria and Sweden.As anticipated, the Swedish results were found to be fair, while the results from the Nigerian election demonstrated likely voter fraud.

Weidmann’s study on the Afghan elections was part of his ongoing project, under the direction of Wilson School professor Jacob Shapiro, examining political hotspots and the effect of political violence on voting. In addition to Afghanistan, the project analyses other politically unstable countries, including Iraq and Pakistan.

Weidmann hails from Switzerland, where he earned degrees in comparative and international studies as well as political science from ETH Zurich. He also has a Master of Science degree in computer science from the University of Freiburg in Germany.