Political Consequences of Technologies to Counter Electoral Fraud: How Local Political Parties React to Biometric Identification Machines in Colombia

Registration and Link for the Online Seminar

Our monthly seminars are hosted on Microsoft Teams, last 1 hour, are open and free of charge.

Those who are not part of the University of Bologna's academic community, are asked to send their full name and email to anwesha.chakraborty3@unibo.it and fernand.vasconcellos@unibo.it so that they can receive the link to access the online talk.

Here you can find the link for the seminar that will be held on the 29 of October from 5 PM to 6 PM.

Talk Description

Biometric identification machines (BIMs) are part of a new set of tools available to prevent electoral fraud. These machines allow electoral authorities to tackle the impersonation of voters and the illegal substitution of poll workers, and are currently used in approximately 40 countries. During this talk, Manoel Gehrke presents his research, which investigates the electoral consequences of BIMs. Taking advantage of their partial deployment in elections to department assemblies in Colombia, the research finds that the presence of BIMs, on average, increased the vote shares of incumbent legislators in municipalities that are governed by mayors in the same political party. Strong local parties strategically evade BIMs and use aggregation fraud to compensate for potential losses in their strongholds. Meanwhile, voters’ experiences with vote-buying and intimidation were unchanged. By highlighting the unintended consequences of anti-fraud interventions, Manoel Gehrke shows how his research's findings corroborate the importance of comprehensive strategies to ensure electoral integrity to avoid that well-connected politicians are able to circumvent controls.

Short Bio of the Seminar Speaker

Manoel Gehrke is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Bocconi University. Gehrke is a researcher at CLEAN, a unit that focuses on organized crime, corruption, and money laundering. He works in the fields of comparative politics and political economy of development with a regional focus on Latin America. His research investigates the effectiveness of anti-corruption interventions, the role of money in politics, electoral fraud, and government responsiveness in developing democracies. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from UCLA in 2019. He has a MSc. in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University, an MA in International Politics from the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI) and a BA in Economics from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). More about Manoel Gehrke: https://manoelgehrke.com/

This Seminar is part of the BIT-ACT Seminar Series

Hosted by the Department of Political and Social Science at the University of Bologna, the seminar series is organized as part of the ERC funded project BIT-ACT, which investigates how social movement organizations develop and employ Artificial Intelligence and various types of digital media to counter corruption from the grassroots.

The seminar is also part of the events organized by the Alma Mater Research Institute for Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence.