Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
2024 is the biggest election year in history with more than half the global population living in countries holding polls. Add in all the countries that have held elections in the past few years and most of the world seems to live in a democracy.
But looks can be deceiving.
Pakistan Elections 2024
There are questions about how free or fair these elections will be.
Presidential Election – Rwandans vote to extend Paul Kagame’s Rule
This exercise is only a formality.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
Globally democracy is in retreat.
They are being tortured. They are being murdered.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
Over 70 elections are scheduled during 2024 but The Economist estimated that more than a third will not be fully free and fair.
Fadzayi Mahere
Former opposition MP
They are dictators. They have declared war on the people.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
Authoritarian regimes are excelling at using rigged elections to consolidate power.
Conning citizens at the same times as repressing citizens.
And they have playbook that is worryingly effective. So how do you rig an election?
NOW&NEXT
How to rig an election
Harare, Zimbabwe
Fadzayi Mahere
Former opposition MP
I’ve been arrested and jailed four times.
Riot police have arrived at Bridge Spa where we’ve just been arrested and they’re armed. We’re going live, Emma here’s my…
You sit in a cell with no toilet, no water, urine everywhere on the floor. You are overcrowded, everybody is coughing and spluttering on top of one another. The blankets are infested with lice, they’ve got blood stains.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
Fadzayi Mahere has suffered the consequences of publicly opposing the ruling Zanu-PF party in Zimbabwe. In the election in 2023 she stood as an opposition MP. She won her seat but stepped down soon after Zanu-PF pushed out a number of her fellow MPs on dubious grounds.
Fadzayi Mahere
Former opposition MP
Zanu-PF likes to make an example of those who speak out, especially using the stratagem of the law. Persecution by prosecution. The laws need to protect it is not meant to be used as a tool for oppression.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
Behind Zanu-PF’s abuse of the law is a clear aim. Rigging elections to hold on to power. It’s a common tactic.
Autocratic regimes need to hamstring the opposition often long before polling day. One way to do this is to weaponise the law by using it to repress political opponents. Let’s call it lawfare.
Nic Cheeseman
Author of How to Rig an Election
University of Birmingham
The way that lawfare has been used in some cases has become increasingly outrageous. We see for example changes to the law to essentially make it very difficult for opposition parties to register or to actually stand at all. We see the use of the law to prevent opposition parties and leaders from actually being on the ballot so that people can’t vote for them.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
Because the law is such a useful weapon, autocrats make huge efforts to win control of the Court to secure convictions against opponents. Maybe even changing their country’s constitution.
Kholood Khair works for a think tank which focusses on governance.
Kholood Khair
Founding Director
Confluence Advisory
In parts of Africa where some constitutions are only decades old, there’s not that attachment by the public to these constitutions and so leaders there feel that it is quite easy then to change the system. Rwanda is a key example of this. The Rwandan President, Paul Kagame is able to now stay in power for another ten years if he so wishes because he has amended the constitution.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
It’s a neat trick. The longer autocrats are in power the easier it is to wage lawfare.
Fadzayi Mahere
Former opposition MP
Okay so it looks to me like you do have a defence.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
Back in Zimbabwe Fadzayi also practices as a lawyer and is dedicated to fighting the regimes abuses of the legal system but it is an uphill struggle.
Zanu-PF have been in power for forty four years. First led by Robert Mugabe and now by his successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa. Both leaders have brutally cracked down on those who oppose them. Like Fadzayi.
Fadzayi Mahere
Former opposition MP
I’ve been targeted by Zanu-PF because I am unafraid to speak out. Participating in politics in Zimbabwe comes at an extremely high cost. Your life, liberty, your livelihood are all at stake.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
Just by giving this interview Fadzayi is risking up to twenty years in prison thanks to a law passed in 2023 which criminalises acts that it says damage the sovereignty and national interest of Zimbabwe. And alongside legal tactics like this, Zanu-PF deploys illegal ones too.
Fadzayi Mahere
Former opposition MP
I would get calls at 3.00am to be told that someone had been abducted. I would get a message whilst sitting in Court someone had died because they’d been stoned by thugs on their way to a rally. I’d be sitting in Church and get news that one of our rally’s had been disrupted because Zanu-PF members had just gone on to the scene with spears and machetes.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
Almost 80% of the world’s population live in countries where people often suffer human rights abuses linked to political repression.
As well as cowing the opposition with violence and lawfare, autocrats find unscrupulous ways to dominate the public conversations.
Control the Media
Controlling the media is an important long-term strategy for authoritarian governments. If public broadcasters are turned into propaganda megaphones and dissenting media are muzzled, it gives incumbents a huge advantage come election day.
In 2023 a report by Freedom House, a non-profit based in Washington found that at least 47 governments deployed commentators to covertly manipulate online discussions in their favour. More than double the number of a decade before.
In Venezuela for example, pro-government messages have spread online through AI generated videos of news anchors from a non-existent international English language channel.
If the Venezuelan economy is as destroyed as the media claims, is it possible for Venezuelans’ to afford a vacation?
Hello to the African people.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
Even if it may not convince everyone, similar AI technology has also appeared to promote propaganda for a pro-Russian military regime in Burkina Faso.
I appeal to the solidarity of the African people and the people of Burkina Faso to effectively support the authorities of the transition.
Nic Cheeseman
Author of How to Rig an Election
University of Birmingham
Perhaps the scariest development over the last five, ten years has been what’s been called by many people digital authoritarianism. When Twitter, WhatsApp started there was this great wave of hope that all of a sudden there would be this new kind of techno democracy where the ability to be present online would undermine physical forms of coercion and repression. Instead, what we’ve actually seen is authoritarian governments have become incredibly good at controlling digital spaces.
Kholood Khair
Founding Director
Confluence Advisory
Until there are some serious safeguards and well developed media literacy across a broad range of populations we are going to continue to see the prevalence of these disinformation campaigns.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
So once an autocrat has hobbled the opposition and corrupted public discourse attention can turn to rigging voting systems.
Rigging voting systems is about making sure the playing field is not even, usually long before polling day and there are plenty of options here.
Gerrymandering
Gerrymandering means fiddling with electoral boundaries to make opposition votes count for less. The word comes from America but the tactic has been copied and made more effective in other countries like Zimbabwe, El Salvador and Hungary.
You can dilute the voting power of an opposition party’s supporters either by spreading their votes more thinly over more districts or by concentrating them into fewer districts. You can use both methods to ensure that the opposition wins fewer seats. But there are other tricks too.
Supress Votes
One way to gain any electoral system is to block the wrong kind of votes.
In Zimbabwe’s 2023 Presidential election opposition supporters experienced this first hand.
Fadzayi Mahere
Former opposition MP
The voter registration process was extremely difficult in urban areas and areas where they perceived the opposition to be strong. They would simply say there is no electricity today, the machines aren’t working. People would just not find their names on the voters’ roll. Flyers were distributed all over urban centres. People just woke up and there was a trail of flyers saying ‘Don’t go to vote, voting doesn’t work’.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
All over the world governments come up with creative ways to cheat. In 2012 in Ukraine election officials found pens full of disappearing ink in voting booths. In Iraq in 2018 a few days after a re-count was ordered in the general election a warehouse full of ballots just happened to catch fire. But stopping people from voting against you is one thing. Another way to cheat is to bribe people to vote for you.
Buy Votes
Vote buying happens all around the world. It’s common in Africa when there’s a long history of politicians steering public money to their own ethnic group or region.
In Uganda the President, Yoweri Museveni is now serving his sixth term in office after winning a flawed election in 2021.
We are being murdered. We are nonviolent.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
His opponents are often harassed or locked up but cash has also been an important part of his winning strategy.
President Museveni’s donation of £250m…
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
Here he is handing over a literal sack of money.
Nic Cheeseman
Author of How to Rig an Election
University of Birmingham
For his critics this was straight forwardly a bribe. To his supporters this was an example of his generosity. One of the things we know though is that consistently appearing in venues like that and handing over cash in that way communicates a very strong message to voters which is ‘I have access to resources, I will bring these resources to you’.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
In recent surveys nearly 20% of respondents in Africa said they’d been offered a gift in exchange for their vote in the most recent election.
In twenty Latin American countries surveyed separately the figure was 8%.
In another survey nearly a third of voters in Bulgaria, Indonesia, the Philippines and Kenya said they had been offered cash, food or other goods in exchange for their vote.
Roukaya Kasenally
Chair, Electoral Institute
For Sustainable Democracy in Africa
Once an electorate has tasted you know, the sweet offerings of vote buying, they become very demanding. Each election becomes a horse racing sort of approach, which means that you give more and more and more, it’s a never ending process.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
However it is hard to guarantee that just because someone accepts a bribe they’ll vote for you.
So sometimes rigging an election requires one of the older tricks.
Stuff the ballot box
Simply making up as many votes as you need can get you over the line but crudely stuffing the ballot box like this tends to be a last resort, it’s easy to spot and that makes it risky.
Roukaya Kasenally
Chair, Electoral Institute
For Sustainable Democracy in Africa
Ballot stuffing was very often it was caught red-handed and people realised that winning with more ballot papers than voters actually was quite grotesque.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
A disputed election is never a good look, and it can lead to tragedy. Blatant ballot box stuffing in Kenya’s 2007 election triggered an outbreak of violence in which over a thousand people lost their lives.
Most election riggers prefer to be more subtle. They want to cheat just enough to win but not so much that everyone knows they cheated. The better a government disguises its fraud, the easier it is for the rest of the world to overlook it.
Nic Cheeseman
Author of How to Rig an Election
University of Birmingham
The international community has always been complicit in electoral manipulation in some countries at some times. Where countries have valuable natural resources, where countries are strategically important because of anti-terror operations and the like we have often seen governments in the west give leaders a free pass on manipulated elections or reduce the criticism that they use relative to other countries.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
And when western governments do point out flawed elections the people rigging them often bring up colonial history.
Kholood Khair
Founding Director
Confluence Advisory
There’s a bit of an irony I think that a lot of African leaders find today which is that the same colonial powers that repressed them for sometimes centuries are the same ones preaching democracy now. So it’s become a little bit easy for those global leaders to push back on western ideas of democracy.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
The blueprint for rigging an election and the reasons for doing it are worryingly clear. Phony democracies tend to last longer than pure dictatorships. That’s why would be autocrats try to gut the institutions that check their power rather than abolishing them. It is also why defending those institutions - the Courts, the media, the Election Commission is the best way to defend democracy.
Fadzayi Mahere
Former opposition MP
When we fight and when we speak out and when we get jailed, it is so that Zimbabwe can have a shot at something better.
Robert Guest
Deputy Editor, The Economist
I am Robert Guest, Deputy Editor of The Economist. If you’d like to read more about coverage of democracy please click on the link opposite and if you would like to watch more of our Now & Next series, please click on the other link. Thanks for watching and don’t forget to subscribe.