Home > 2.2 Polling station > Report on the Identification of Electoral Irregularities by Statistical Methods
 
 
 
Download file    
 
 
Paragraph 24
 

A second family of tests looks at turnout, invalid votes, and uniformity of vote shares across polling stations or political geography. Variation across polling stations is natural, and should not automatically be attributed to malpractice. However, there are statistical procedures that test whether patterns (e.g. high turnout and high uniformity of the vote) would be surprising if the votes were generated by a particular, hypothetical “fair” process.