Maple Leaf Stories: Election Fraud (1)

"A car driver said to his friend next to him, 'Uh-oh. I just made an illegal left turn.'

'That's okay. The police car behind us did the same thing,' answered the friend casually."

"We select our governments through elections," said Maple leave after greeting with Basmalah and Salaam. "Parties propose policies and present candidates, we vote, someone is declared winner according to pre- established rules, the winner moves into the government office. Glitches do sometimes occur but mostly the process works smoothly. We are governed for a few years and then have a chance to decide whether to retain the incumbents or throw the rascals out. All of this is so routine that we take it for granted.

As familiar as this experience is, elections are a perplexing phenomenon. In a typical election about one in two voters ends up on the losing side. In presidential systems the winner rarely receives much more than 50 percent of the vote and in parliamentary multi-party systems the largest share is rarely higher than 40 percent. Moreover, many people who voted for the winners are dismayed with their performance in office. So most of us are left disappointed, either with the outcome or with the performance of the winner. Yet, election after election, most of us hope that our favorite candidate will win the next time around and will not disappoint. Hope and disappointment, disappointment and hope: something is strange. The only analogy I can think of is sport: my soccer team, Arsenal, has not won the championship in many years but every new season I still hope it will. After all, in other realms of life we adjust our expectations on the basis of past experience. But not in elections. The siren song of elections is just irresistible. Is it irrational?

Questions concerning the value of elections as a mechanism by which we collectively choose who will govern us and how they will do it have become particularly urgent. In many democracies large numbers of people feel that elections only perpetuate the rule of 'establishment,' 'elites,' or even 'messy', while at the other extreme many are alarmed by the rise of 'populist,' xenophobic and repressive. These attitudes are intensely held on both sides, generating deep divisions, 'polarization,' and are interpreted by various pundits as a 'crisis ofdemocracy' or at least as a sign of dissatisfaction with the very institution of elections. Survey results show that people in general and young people in particular now consider it less 'essential' than in the past to live in a country that is governed democratically–all of which supports the claim that democracy is in crisis.

In 2024, significant allegations of election fraud surrounded presiden­tial elections in Indonesia. Concerns have been raised regarding all aspects of elections, from pork barrel project and voter registration fraud to voting machine security.

The potential for election fraud over­ shadows elections in all election-holding countries, even long-established democracies, R. Michael Alvarez [et al] write. Investigations by journalists, academics, lawyers, political parties, official nonpartisan observers, and interested citizens have drawn attention to cases of clear-cut voting fraud in many countries around the world. These cases are troubling because fair and competitive elections are widely understood to be a necessary element of representative democracy. Electoral manipulation diminishes many of the assumed benefits of democratic governance, including public accountability, transparency, and representation.

Dissatisfaction with the results of elections is not the same as dissatisfactions with elections as a mechanism of collective decision-making. True, finding oneself on the losing side is disagreeable. Satisfaction with democracy is higher among those who voted for the winners rather than the losers. Moreover, having been offered a choice, the fact that parties presented distinct platforms in the electoral campaign is valued by the winners more than by the losers. But what people value most in elections is just being able to vote for a party that represents their views, even when they end up on the losing side. When people react against 'the establishment,' they often just mean either that no party represents their views or that governments change without an effect on their lives, indicating that elections do not generate change. But we can, and a large majority does, value the mechanism of elections even when we do not like their outcomes.

An election in which every vote is stolen should be considered fraudulent. So called 'electoral authoritarian' regimes often have used elections to legitimate their rule and, to the surprise of many observers, sometimes fail to win these elec­tions. In these cases, regimes have to decide whether to cheat—to steal the election—or to submit to the will of the people and transfer power to the winner.

When authoritarian regimes lose elections, power is not automatically trans­ferred. These regimes commit a form of manipulation after election day, or even long before, if they fail to accept the results and retain power through other means such as bribery, intimidation and postelection wholesale fraud (manipulating the vote tallies, or systematically engaged in violence and intimidation to ensure that the opposition is weakened, and he continues to win elections). Of course, not all authoritarian governments resort to fraud in order to hold on to power; the party of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua handed over power to the opposition when they lost elections in 1990. Likewise, many nations with long histories of democratic government have held elections where irregularities and administrative problems raised questions about the integrity of elections where existing governments have tried to retain power, such as in the 2006 parliamentary elections in Italy. In jurisdictions where elections are run perfectly, accusations of fraud can under­mine public confidence in the electoral process.

Why did election fraud occur? Understanding of the concept are rooted in each country’s cultural and political milieu. Differences in countries’ electoral laws and differences in political culture contribute to whether a given activity is perceived as election fraud. Consider, for example, the allegations of fraud in Mexico’s 2006 presidential election. Some charges centered on the use of door to-door canvassing by one of the political parties and whether such campaigning constituted undue partisan pressure on voters. Similarly, the decision by President Vicente Fox to endorse one of the candidates, also similar to Indonesia in 2024 election, running to replace him was perceived within Mexico as illegitimate pressuring of voters and an unfair use of state funds to promote one candidate.

Culture also affects how different countries view the same election reforms. Estonia conducts elections using the Internet, something that critics of elec­tronic voting in the United States have argued is a recipe for election fraud. Likewise, India adopted electronic voting because it helped to mitigate the rampant practice of armed gunmen’s stuffing ballot boxes in certain regions of the country. In the United States, electronic voting equipment, similar to that used successfully in India, is viewed as a potential source of fraud by a subset of voters and activists. In each of these cases, history, politics, and culture together shape how a given reform is viewed in the context of election fraud.

Election fraud was a routine occurrence in the early his­tory of the United States. George Washington won an election in colonial Vir­ ginia in part by spending lavishly on alcohol for voters on election day, and his fellow Founding Father, James Madison, lost an election in Virginia in part be­ cause he refused to spend money on such things. These were not isolated instances. Balloting in the early and mid-1800s was rife with potential for manipulation. Elections were not conducted on secret ballots, which raised concerns about voter intimidation and vote buying. The use of paper ballots and the lack of effective rules governing how ballots were handled led to ques­ tions about ballot box stuffing. The lack of voter registries raised questions about voters’ eligibility to vote in the jurisdiction where they cast ballots.

There have been studies of election fraud, espe­cially in what Fabrice Lehoucq refers to as 'pre-reform political systems.' These are nations that do not meet minimal requirements for a functioning democracy, and whose electoral administration systems appear to allow for much more rampant election fraud. Important examples include Costa Rica, Imperial Germany, Argentina, and Brazil. The general conclusions from this literature are that there are many different ways in which political agents attempt to illegally manipulate election outcomes; however the evidence is weak that many of these manipulations are in fact decisive in determining electoral winners or losers.

Changes in social structure dramatically changed the nature of election fraud. Population movements, changes in economic conditions and labor markets, and educational attain­ ment all can lead to changes in the types and level of fraud. Fraud is also a function of the legal framework in which elections occur. Party competition, how legislative seats are allocated, and the forms of representation that exist can all affect whether the political environment is likely to be a problem.

Political factors, especially political competition and political corruption, have been shown to explain some of the observed variation in election fraud, with a positive cor­relation between competitiveness and various measures of election fraud, with some important exceptions. Institutional factors, in particular the spe cific mechanisms used for legislative elections (for example, majoritarian ver­sus proportional systems), appear to explain much of the variance in election fraud in Costa Rica, with more fraud occurring under majoritarian rules. Economic interests, partisanship and incumbency, and urbanization also appear to correlate with the extent of election fraud.

Many meth­ods of detecting election fraud require a transparent electoral process and high-quality data reported in a timely manner. Detection also requires knowing where to look for election manipulation. For example, fraud is a more cost-effective activity in an election where only a small number of stolen votes are needed to change the outcome of a race. Local races and very close elections are often the places to look for fraud within relatively democratic contexts.

Alvarez [et al] recomended that elections should be made more transparent to observation by impartial and nonpar­tisan observers. States should adopt laws that allow for neutral organizations to observe vot ing in order to signal that the elections are being conducted in a free and fair manner. An additional benefit of such observation is that scholars and interested students of elections will gain access to information about the mechanics of voting operations at polling places and thus study the efficacy of election administration practices that relate to election fraud prevention. Presently, lack of access by nonpartisan observers to a diverse sample of polling stations is one of the barriers to scholarly evaluation of election administration.

Elections are a modern phenomenon. During most human history, the right to rule did not require authorization from those ruled. This right was taken to be natural, given by the order of things or the will of some supreme authority. The idea that 'the people,' always in the singular, should govern itself was only ushered in at the end of the eighteenth century, as a result of two revolutions–in the United States and in France. The problem to be solved, as posed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1762, was to 'find a form of association which defends and protects with all the shared force the person and the goods of each associate, and through which each, uniting with all, still obeys but himself, remaining as free as before'. The solution to this problem was 'self-government of the people.' Self-government, in turn, was desirable because it was the best system to advance liberty. We are free when we are bound only by laws we choose: this is the source of the power and appeal of 'self-government.'

Yet all cannot govern at the same time. We must be ruled by others. And ruling inevitably entails coercion. The rulers can take money from some and give it to others; they can force everyone to have needles stuck in their arms; they can keep people in jails, and in barbarian countries even take lives. Here then is the conundrum: how can people be free if they are coerced by others? The answer was that we can choose who would rule us by selecting them through elections. They would represent us because we elect them to do so.

Let's continue this on the next session, bi 'idhnillah."

Similar to the pattern of the previous story, before moving on to the next episode, Maple also sang,

Because the sky is blue,

it makes me cry

Because the sky is blue *)

Citations & References:

- Adam Przeworski, Why Bother with Elections?, 2018, Polity Press

- R. Michael Alvarez, Thad E. Hall, and Susan D. Hyde (Ed.), Election Fraud: Detecting and Deterring Electoral Manipulation, 2008, Brookings Institution

*) "Because" written by John Lennon & Paul McCartney

[Episode 2]

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