Who Claims Fraud? Correlates of State Legislators' Voter Fraud Claims

By: Samantha Register, Srinivas Parinandi, Alexandra A Siegel

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State legislators play a key role in election administration, but have increasingly challenged the legitimacy of elections. Using a dataset of tweets from over 4200 state legislators, we examine the institutional, individual, and state-level factors associated with legislators' propensity to make electoral fraud claims from 2019 to 2022, a period characterized by heightened criticism of status quo electoral procedure. We find that Republican partisanship, state polarization, serving in a state with a higher nonwhite population, and belonging to the state's upper chamber are correlated with more frequent election fraud tweets. Meanwhile, legislative professionalism, committee leadership, unified government, and being a female legislator are associated with making fewer fraud claims. By shifting attention from Congress to state legislatures—institutions that directly oversee election rules and administration—we identify correlates of public contestation of electoral procedure among subnational elites.