‘Take Azerbaijan’s 2013 elections, when the highly repressive government of President Ilham Aliyev sought to boost its democratic credentials by launching an iPhone app that enabled citizens to keep up to speed with the vote tallies as ballot counting took place. Touting its commitment to transparency, the regime said that the new technology would allow anyone to watch the results in real time. But those who were keen to try out the new technology were surprised to find that they could see the results on the app the day before the polls opened. In other words, anyone with the app could see who had won, who had lost, and by how much, before any ballots had even been cast.’ (Cheeseman, Nicholas -2018 – ‘How to Rig an Election,’ Yale University Press).
The authors argued that Azerbaijan was not an outlier: they had interviews with more than 500 elite figures ranging from prime ministers and presidents, lower-level election officials who have rigged elections, ambassadors, aid workers, opposition candidates, rebels and coup plotters disillusioned with democracy from countries such as Belarus, Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria, Thailand, Tunisia, Uganda, the United States and Zimbabwe. They had also witnessed electoral manipulation at first hand and their mission was to reveal the lessons they had learnt.