@workingpaper {693744, title = {Getting a seat at the (electoral) table: Partisan poll workers and electoral bias}, year = {Submitted}, abstract = {Does poll workers{\textquoteright} partisanship affect electoral outcomes? Many countries use partisan and adversarial vote-counting systems where poll workers are party representatives and mutual control is expected to provide fairness. Yet in countries with dominant party regimes, parties often have de facto unequal capacities to send representatives to all booths. Exploiting as-if random assignment of voters to booths in Paraguay{\textquoteright}s 2018 general elections, we estimate that partisan poll workers decrease an opposing party{\textquoteright}s vote share by up to 2 percentage points (pp) and increase theirs by up to 1 pp. Our analyses also demonstrate how incentives for electoral manipulation vary by electoral system. Dominant parties{\textquoteright} poll workers collude against smaller parties more often in proportional representation races. In contrast, single-winner plurality voting yields less collusion because the winner-take-all aspect of these races hampers collusion. Our results have practical implications for politicians and policymakers, and theoretical implications for elections in developing democracies.\ }, author = {Duarte, Ra{\'u}l and Andr{\'e}s Carrizosa} }