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.