Alberto Simpser distinguished between true, actual and reported turnout, where actual turnout is the share of voters who came to voting booths, the reported turnout is the share declared by the government, and the true turnout is the counterfactual notion: the share of individuals who would vote if they did not expect the falsifications. A gap between true and actual turnouts appears because the rational voter anticipating that his/her vote would be stolen, prefers to abstain. Still, many politicians find attractive the strategy to announce the forthcoming electoral fraud.
Since it is little known how the expectations of electoral fraud affect intentions of voters the aim of this paper is to answer two following research questions: does the extra publicly available information of the electoral fraud decrease the chance of the opposition to win? Do the voters for governing party and opposition react differently on the additional information about the forthcoming expected electoral fraud?
A game-theoretical model shows that the expectations of the fraud suppresses the voters' turnout, but the willingness to go to the ballot boxes is more suppressed by the fraud expectations among pro-government electorate. The proposed experimental design is aimed to test the veracity of this model in the lab.