Our intention when we decided to hold a small conference on election fraud and then organize the contributions from that conference into this edited volume was to kindle scholarly research on a subject we think is academically and politically important. A common frustration for academics who have been involved in election reform activities in recent years is the lack of hard empirical data on election fraud. We have a difficult time answering even basic questions about election fraud: What types of election fraud exist? What factors explain the variation in election fraud across time and space?