My interest in election manipulation was motivated by an intention to prevent it, but I soon came to realise that defending elections against a determined autocrat is not easy. Indeed, it is made more difficult by the new digital technologies that were initially proclaimed to be a boon for the democratic process but have all become useful additions to the autocratic tool box. Thus, in Somaliland in 2008 and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2011 modern biometric registration processes were introduced but the electoral commission did not conduct effective audits of the process and in the latter country 700,000 double registrations were detected by the commission which ruled that it was too late to clean the register’ (Cheeseman Nicholas and Brian Klaas (2018) How to Rig an Election. Yale University Press).
The struggle against elections rigging involves ‘closing off one avenue of rigging after another until counterfeit democrats have nowhere left to turn’ and over the years, Guyana has been attempting to do just that, but a lot remains to be done. The authors identified half a dozen interrelated strategies used by autocrats, many of which have been tested in Guyana, which must be satisfactorily countered in a multifaceted manner if elections manipulations are to be eliminated or seriously reduced. Here I consider a few of their recommendations that I believe are relevant to Guyana.
Population movement and the need for each vote to have similar weight in the electoral process means that periodic redistricting cannot be avoided and thus gerrymandering, i.e. geographically reconstituted districts in favour of one or the other party, is made possible. Given its type of proportional representation (PR), gerrymandering is not possible at the national level in Guyana, but immediately before the local government elections of 2018, the government announced the formation of new local government areas that the opposition claimed was done with little consultation and was intended to gerrymander the system in favour of the government. Local government redistricting in Guyana is totally in the hands of the minister responsible for local government, but to avoid these kinds of disputes, Cheeseman and Klaas recommended the establishment of independent electoral boundaries commissions.
In India, for example, an independent (non-political) three-member delimitation commission comprising a former Supreme Court judge, the chief elections commissioner of India and the state election commissioner of the state concerned was established to carry out this process. Both national and local political participation is ensured by there being five non-voting advisory representatives from the given state legislature and five from the national parliament. The commission is also required to consult various district officials before preparing a detailed draft proposal.
The existence here of two large ethnically allied political groups containing some 80% of the population means that buying votes is successful largely within one’s ethnic enclave. However, one politician has openly stated what many people believe to be widespread: the intention to give preference to their party supporters when administrating state affairs. Holding big popular concerts and/or purchasing and handing out free tickets to these events either to win and/or to suppress the vote of the younger generation has become the norm. Significantly, the authors noted that ‘one of the common features of election campaigns ‘is that they are preceded by large corruption scams that generate resources that can be used to run the campaign. … [This] often involves procurement scams in which the government purchases something it does not need at a vastly inflated price so that the excess money can be funneled back into the pockets of party leaders.’
As with most other concerns, voter education that points to the scope and nature of the problem, its corrosive impact on the democratic process, stronger rules and policing and where necessary encouraging the voters to take the bribes and still vote according to their conscience have all been recommended. Of course, to counter these efforts counterfeit democrats have attempted to make voters feel that the ballot is not really secret by spreading rumours, strategically deploying security officers in polling booths, demanding photographic evidence of the vote and where individuals cannot be easily identified, taking vengeance and thus making examples of their communities.
Apart from gerrymandering, the optimal strategies that could occur months or even years before an election are: manipulation of the voters’ register and various forms of voter suppression. As we speak, the Guyana government and opposition are quarrelling over the need for a new house-to-house registration. The former is arguing that when it was in government the opposition padded the voters’ list and the opposition is claiming that the regime is attempting to suppress its voters by removing them from the list. There is little doubt that incumbent regimes can go to great lengths to suppress votes. In Zimbabwe, to suppress opposition the ZANU-PF sought to prevent children from acquiring their birth certificates. “Not believing that any ruling party could be quite so cynical and forward-thinking as to plan election rigging eighteen years … ahead of time, … After hearing the allegation, the official rocked back in his chair, chuckled and said, ‘That I can neither confirm nor deny… but, you know, you have to get up very early in the morning to beat ZANU–PF.’” What is required here is extensive opposition and civil society participation in any process that has to do with voter identification, registration, etc, and election monitors who are willing to cite the background conditions under which elections are held as a reason to question the outcomes.
The new digital technologies are not only used to spread fake news but have been repeatedly used to hack into elections infrastructure. As a result, India designed what it boasted was a tamper-proof voting machine secured by the latest technology. ‘However, University of Michigan researchers built a custom-made device that used Bluetooth technology to steal votes without tampering with the physical device.’ A team of researchers from Harvard and Indiana universities have identified three key elements of election infrastructure that are vulnerable to manipulation, attack and rigging: voter rolls (who can vote); voting machines (who you vote for); and tabulation (the government’s count of how many votes each candidate received) to actually change the votes.’
To deal with fake news there are now fact check websites such as Africa Check and the International Fact Check Network, but the situation can be improved with more localized inputs that enhance the transparency of social media. Governments need to make electoral cyber security a top priority, strengthening the ‘firewalls’ around the information held by opposition parties and electoral commissions, introduce industry best practices to provide a layer of checks to deter and detect possible attacks, hold parallel vote tabulations to deter tallying fraud and implement routine, perhaps bipartisan, audit of every part of the electoral process.
I began this series with an illustration of how a counterfeit democrat attempted to craft his elections strategy to camouflage his true intent and dupe the international community to avoid the international opprobrium and other costs associated with elections manipulations. The Forbes Burnham regime in Guyana expended a great deal of resources on its foreign relations and notwithstanding the era, its extant geopolitical importance and border problems, reaped the benefit of being far better regarded internationally than his persistent elections manipulation should have allowed.
The system of international monitoring is said to require three main interventions to improve the prospects for protecting elections. In a nutshell, monitors need to keep up with the technological times and deploy biometric technology, computer logs and storage, and expertise to give an indication of whether there is a hidden digital pattern of electoral manipulation, ensure that weaknesses they identify in the system are rectified or refuse to monitor elections where this is not done, and devise and implement a common set of standards and give joint statements to send a clear message to the ruling parties.
