Statistical Detection of Vote Count Fraud: 2009 Albanian Parliamentary Election and Benford’s Law

Election fraud is difficult to be detected especially in developing countries undergoing multiple dimensional transitions. The Albanian political actors’ mistrust leads to a fraudulent environment for all elections held since 1991 (post-communist regime) being disputed for potential fraud. This paper applies the first digit Benford’s Law to the 2009 parliamentary elections results for each of the 12 districts as a way of mapping the disputes for the fraud level during elections. The results and graphs show that there has been an obvious election fraud; there is no correlation between the votes and Benford’s rate in almost all the districts. The analysis performed evidences the shift of votes from smaller parties towards the major ones especially towards the Democratic Party and Socialist Integration Movement (2009-13 governmental coalition) and also the swung of votes from the losing coalition (including the Socialist Party as leading party of the governmental opposition) to the wining one. There is evidenced also a shift of votes from the main parties to the smaller ones, probably within the same coalition. The fraud evidenced from Benford’s Law (as per figures presented) illustrates that the incurred level has resulted in the alteration of political representative number currently in the Parliament, both at party and coalition level.