This paper explores an overlooked mechanism through which election fraud may occur at polling stations-through election malpractices. I argue that partisan election officials may use "simple" violations of electoral laws to perpetrate electoral fraud. Such acts often go undetected. This helps to explain the occurrence of fraud even at polling stations monitored by election observers. I use polling station level data collected during Ghana's 2012 general election to test my argument. I find that electoral malpractices are systematically correlated with fraud, and malpractices occur more frequently in competitive electoral districts. This suggests malpractices are often purposeful attempts to commit fraud.

The academic literature on Africa tends to depict electoral manipulation as something that is done by political elites to ordinary voters. In line with this, nationally representative surveys conducted by the authors in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda show general - though by no means universal - condemnation for behaviours that break formal electoral rules. However, they also reveal that there are some forms of manipulation that voters encourage, endorse, or at least accept. In other words, some types of problematic behaviour, such as vote buying, are actually demanded by citizens, while others, such as ballot box stuffing, are not. As a result, politicians become locked into forms of behaviour of dubious democratic character in part because they are likely to find it harder to win popular support if they abstain. Through a discussion of debates and behaviours in six constituencies across East and West Africa, we investigate and seek to explain these patterns. In so doing, we demonstrate that voters make a distinction between behaviours that they see as being "wrong and punishable" - most notably, the use of violence and ballot box stuffing - and behaviours which they see as possibly wrong, but not deserving of punishment, such as vote buying. These findings suggest a problematic moral economy of elections, in which commitment to democratic norms is - in part at least - conditioned by self-interest and political allegiance.

The 2014 governorship election held in the southwest Nigerian state of Ekiti produced a startling result. The challenger, Mr. Ayodele Fayose, a previously impeached governor, decisively defeated the sitting governor, Dr Kayode Fayemi, despite the latter's incumbent advantage and his reputation as a reformer. Popular explanations of the results emphasized that cash and other gifts items had been exchanged to an unprecedented degree even for the typical Nigerian election, in which the giving of cash and gifts to voters is considered a norm of political behavior, as Bratton has argued.

The challenger had, in this view, simply offered more inducements than had the incumbent, who was rather all-too focused on making programmatic appeals. These accounts, moreover, chimed with scholarly depictions of vote buying as both indispensable for electoral victory and more convincing to African electorates than policy appeals.

This paper draws on data gathered among day laborers and party activists in Ado-Ekiti, the capital of Ekiti State, to assess the perceptions of a poor urban constituency regarding the relationship between candidates' programs, policies, and personality. Drawing on existing scholarship problematizing the ontology of vote-buying I argue that candidate's varied approaches to gift-giving were understood by poor voters in Ekiti not as financial bids for their votes but rather as 'signs of virtue'. Personalities and gift-exchanges were thus understood as symbolic of the rival policy preferences of the main challengers, a proposition that complicates clear distinctions in comparative politics between personality, patronage, and programmatic based mobilisation strategies.

In our research (http://www.britac.ac.uk/node/4660), we have adopted a comparative perspective to explore the links between elections and corruption in competitive authoritarian regimes with case studies in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Our focus are informal governance practices that supersede the normativity of the formal legal framework and facilitate the re-distribution of power and access public resources among networks of political and business elites as well as certain privileged social groups.

We find that informal practices have been employed around election time in the three countries with very concrete and similar goals.

First, informal power networks are activated and engaged in practices of prebendal cooptation to secure electoral success by cementing a winning coalition but also through the use of informal practices of control to demobilize the opposition.

Secondly, informal networks mobilise in order to finance campaign and other costs associated with the elections, including the distribution of resources among support bases (patronage and vote buying). In some cases financial constraints are addressed through what we have termed "horizontal co-optation" referring to particular business interests who contribute resources for financing electoral expenditures in the expectation of receiving financial rewards such as contracts and tax exemptions. In some other cases, resort to outright embezzlement serves the purpose, as indicated by grand corruption scandals in the three countries that have been associated with the intention to divert large sums for electoral purposes.

In our paper we will discuss these findings identifying common patterns across the three countries and use the perspective of informal governance to discuss the current challenges confronting these East African regimes.

When do African politicians inflate voter registers? When do they destroy ballots? And when do they stuff ballot boxes? In this paper, I explore the subnational patterns of electoral manipulation in Ghana. I argue (1) that in addition to direct benefits of electoral manipulation, i.e. the increased chance of winning, there are important indirect benefits that drive African politicians to manipulate even when victory is guaranteed; (2) that electoral manipulation is expensive and that the direct costs discourage it as much as the indirect costs, i.e. the risk of getting caught; (3) that different types of electoral manipulation have different cost-benefit compositions, allowing politicians to tailor their manipulation strategies and choose the blend of manipulation techniques that best match their needs and capabilities; and (4) that the cost-benefit calculations behind electoral manipulation are made difficult by the scarcity of information, adding a significant stochastic component to the patterns we observe. I test these arguments against a dataset containing information about 505 constituency-level parliamentary elections in Ghana, over two electoral cycles. I show that different types of electoral manipulation have different patterns; that not all types are driven by their direct benefits; and that politicians shift to cheaper, riskier types, when safer ones are too expensive, suggesting a trade-off between the direct and indirect costs of electoral manipulation. The paper proffers a more nuanced understanding of electoral manipulation and contributes to explaining the heterogeneous patterns we observe in many African countries.