# A copula based approach for electoral quick counts

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a copula-based statistical method for electoral quick counts that accounts for dependence among strata and candidates, improving the accuracy of early election result estimates.

## Contribution

It proposes a novel copula-based model that considers dependencies in stratified sampling for electoral quick counts, applied to Mexican presidential elections.

## Key findings

- Dependence among strata and candidates affects quick count accuracy
- The copula model improves estimation reliability
- Applied successfully to multiple election datasets

## Abstract

An electoral quick count is a statistical procedure whose main objective is to obtain a relatively small but representative sample of all the polling stations in a certain election, and to measure the uncertainty about the final result before the total count of votes. A stratified sampling design is commonly preferred to reduce estimation variability. The present work shows that dependence among strata and among candidates should be taken into consideration for statistical inferences therein, and a copula based model is proposed and applied to Mexico's 2006, 2012, and 2018 presidential elections data.