Maple Leaf Stories: Election Fraud (2)

"In a small town, the chief of police, who was also the veterinarian, was awakened from sleep by a frantic telephone call.

'Please come quick!' said the woman on the line.

'Do you need the police or a vet?' he asked.

'Both,' answered the woman. 'We can’t pry our dog’s mouth open, and there’s a burglar’s leg in it.'”

"One of the allegations of Election Fraud in the 2024 elections in Indonesia is the use of 'Pork Barrel Politics.' Before continuing with this concept, let me mention the Declaration on Criteria for Free and Fair Elections adopted by the Inter-Parliamentary Council, which Indonesia is one of its members.

In any State, the authority of the government can only derive from the will of the people as expressed in genuine, free, and fair elections held at regular intervals based on universal, equal, and secret suffrage.

The Declaration mentions the rights and responsibilities of States. That (1) States should take the necessary legislative steps and other measures, by their constitutional processes, to guarantee the rights and institutional framework for periodic and genuine, free, and fair elections, by their obligations under international law. In particular, States should: Establish an effective, impartial, and non-discriminatory procedure for the registration of voters; Establish clear criteria for the registration of voters, such as age, citizenship, and residence, and ensure that such provisions are applied without distinction of any kind; Provide for the formation and free functioning of political parties, possibly regulate the funding of political parties and electoral campaigns, ensure the separation of party and State, and establish the conditions for competition in legislative elections on an equitable basis; Initiate or facilitate national programs of civic education, to ensure that the population are familiar with election procedures and issues;

(2) In addition, States should take the necessary policy and institutional steps to ensure the progressive achievement and consolidation of democratic goals, including through the establishment of a neutral, impartial, or balanced mechanism for the management of elections. In so doing, they should, among other matters: Ensure that those responsible for the various aspects of the election are trained and act impartially, and that coherent voting procedures are established and made known to the voting public; Ensure the registration of voters, updating of electoral rolls and balloting procedures, with the assistance of national and international observers as appropriate; Encourage parties, candidates and the media to accept and adopt a Code of Conduct to govern the election campaign and the polling period; Ensure the integrity of the ballot through appropriate measures to prevent multiple voting or voting by those not entitled to it; Ensure the integrity of the process for counting votes.

(3) States shall respect and ensure the human rights of all individuals within their territory and subject to their jurisdiction. In time of elections, the State and its organs should therefore ensure: That freedom of movement, assembly, association, and expression are respected, particularly in the context of political rallies and meetings; and That parties and candidates are free to communicate their views to the electorate, and that they enjoy equality of access to State and public-service media; That the necessary steps are taken to guarantee non-partisan coverage in State and public-service media.

(4) In order that elections shall be fair, States should take the necessary measures to ensure that parties and candidates enjoy reasonable opportunities to present their electoral platform.

(5) States should take all necessary and appropriate measures to ensure that the principle of the secret ballot is respected, and that voters are able to cast their ballots freely, without fear or intimidation.

(6) Furthermore, State authorities should ensure that the ballot is conducted so as to avoid fraud or other illegality, that the security and the integrity of the process is maintained, and that ballot counting is undertaken by trained personnel, subject to monitoring and/or impartial verification.

(7) States should take all necessary and appropriate measures to ensure the transparency of the entire electoral process including, for example, through the presence of party agents and duly accredited observers.

(8) States should take the necessary measures to ensure that parties, candidates and supporters enjoy equal security, and that State authorities take the necessary steps to prevent electoral violence.

(9) States should ensure that violations of human rights and complaints relating to the electoral process are determined promptly within the timeframe of the electoral process and effectively by an independent and impartial authority, such as an electoral commission or the courts.

Democracy is a universally recognised ideal as well as a goal, which is based on common values shared by peoples throughout the world community irrespective of cultural, political, social and economic differences. It is thus a basic right of citizenship to be exercised under conditions of freedom, equality, transparency and responsibility, with due respect for the plurality of views, and in the interest of the polity.

A state of democracy ensures that the processes by which power is acceded to, wielded and alternates allow for free political competition and are the product of open, free and non-discriminatory participation by the people, exercised in accordance with the rule of law, in both letter and spirit.

Democracy is founded on the primacy of the law and the exercise of human rights. In a democratic State, no one is above the law and all are equal before the law.

The key element in the exercise of democracy is the holding of free and fair elections at regular intervals enabling the people's will to be expressed. These elections must be held on the basis of universal, equal and secret suffrage so that all voters can choose their representatives in conditions of equality, openness and transparency that stimulate political competition. To that end, civil and political rights are essential, and more particularly among them, the rights to vote and to be elected, the rights to freedom of expression and assembly, access to information and the right to organise political parties and carry out political activities. Party organisation, activities, finances, funding and ethics must be properly regulated in an impartial manner in order to ensure the integrity of the democratic processes.

Now, we're back to the 'Pork Barrel Politics'. According to Andrew H. Sidman, 'Pork barrel' [or simply 'pork'] is a pejorative term for a collection of supposedly wasteful federally funded projects in United States—wasteful in the sense that the benefits of these projects are geographically concentrated, meaning that taxpayers are forced to fund many projects from which they receive little or no direct benefit. Pork barreling is also a process, a means of creating and passing legislation. Decrying the growth of the pork barrel in the early twentieth century, Chester Maxey equated the pork barrel with the use of the omnibus bill as a means of appropriating money for river and harbor projects. Pork barreling in this sense is the process by which multiple projects are combined into one piece of legislation to vastly increase the prospects for each project. When these projects were voted on individually, many of them failed, presumably because of the highly concentrated nature of the benefits.

The story of Pork Barrel in American politics is not just a story of individual attitudes, but the opinions and behavior of the mass public do play a crucial part. Incumbents, challengers, and campaign donors all respond to an electoral context in which voters decide the outcome— voters who can be moved or persuaded under the right conditions. Sidman suggests that the pork barrel is never a salient issue in its own right but that at high levels of polarization, there exist systematic links between the pork barrel and attitudes on government spending. As polarization increases, distributive spending leads to increasing support for incumbents among liberals and decreasing support among conservatives.

Spending on public works represents the classic pork barrel project (e.g., the new post office, bridge maintenance) that constituents are assumed to favor regardless of their political predispositions. Building these projects means employment in the community, purchases from local suppliers, and a finished product from which local residents will benefit. Despite this, public-works spending, like the pork barrel broadly, is rooted in ideological conflict.

Mayhew’s suggestion that pork is an important source of credit claiming, added to observations of universalism, has led to theoretical arguments supporting the assumption that voters generally prefer particularistic benefits and reward legislators who secure those benefits. The assumption of electoral benefits finds justification in work finding that electorally vulnerable legislators tend to secure a larger share of spending and in work observing that party leaders use pork to promote policy and electoral ends.Most scholars assume positive relationship between pork and the likelihood of voting for the incumbent, but such a general relationship has been difficult to verify empirically or may be conditioned by individual-level factors such as ideology.

Polarization is the catalyst necessary for the pork barrel to affect electoral outcomes. It is only when the political world becomes more divided over everything else that the average voter pays more attention to distributive spending, linking it to their more general preferences regarding government spending. During periods of low polarization, systematic general effects of the pork bar- rel are largely absent. When polarization is high, pork barrel spending affects primary competition, campaign spending, and ultimately vote share in general elections.

Electoral motivations are central to our understanding of distributive politics. Polarization and the partisan-ideological sorting of voters that has accompanied it, not only condition the electoral effects of the pork barrel, but polarization also shapes the pork barrel itself. The effects of the pork barrel on competition are not limited to primary elections. The relationships between the pork barrel and election outcomes are conditioned by political polarization and consistent with an ideology-based view of the pork barrel. The pork barrel carries different electoral implications in a polarized era and is a meaningful conclusion for scholars of elections and distributive politics.

So, what are the implications of this conception foconceptr Election Fraud in Indonesia? Before the 2014 election, the ideological polarization that occurred in Indonesia was relatively low, so the distribution of social assistance such as 'Direct Cash Assistance' was not yet seen as fraud. After the 2014 and even 2019 elections, polarization crept up, so that, as Sidman stated, the electability preferences of incumbents were wide open. In the 2024 election, the incumbent did not run, but there was nepotism in terms of the candidates.

The challenge of ensuring the integrity and quality of elections is no longer lim­ited to well-established and newly emerging democracies. Elections now take place in ever more challenging environments, including territories under mil­itary occupation. These cases raise important questions about our under­ standing of election fraud and election integrity, as well as our understanding of the role that elections play in a community’s political life.

Elections are central to our understanding of democracy. For example, Robert Dahl’s definition of a polyarchy includes five election-related criteria: the government must be controlled by elected officials; elected officials must be chosen and removed in free, fair, and frequent elections where coercion must be absent; all adults must have the right to vote and most must be able to run for offices; and citizens must have the rights of freedom of expression and association as well as alternative sources of information. Within this context, election fraud is usually defined in procedural terms.

In its narrowest form, the concept of election fraud can be understood as 'the corruption of the process by which votes are cast and counted.' How­ever, many analysts define fraud more broadly to encompass activities at any stage of the electoral process, from voter registration to the final tally of the ballots.' As Larry Diamond puts it, 'Elections are fair when they are administered by a neutral authority; when the electoral administration is sufficiently competent and resourceful to take specific precautions against fraud in the voting and vote counting; when the police, military, and courts treat competing candidates and parties impartially throughout the process; when con­ tenders all have access to the public media; when electoral districts and rules do not systematically disadvantage the opposition; when inde­ pendent monitoring of the voting and vote-counting is allowed at all locations; when the secrecy of the ballot is protected; when virtually all adults can vote; when the procedures for organizing and counting the vote are transparent and known to all; and when there are clear and impartial procedures for resolving complaints and disputes.'

What should we expect from competitive elections? Elections are not pretty, says Przeworski. While politicians have to pretend to be inspirational, claiming that their lofty ideals will lead us to a radiant future, they use every hook or crook to win. They sometimes make promises they know to be infeasible, tinker with rules when they can and evade them when they cannot, and try to mute the voice of the people who may be opposed to them. No wonder quite a few people either just turn off or dream of somehow eliminating the features of elections that offend while preserving the very mechanism of selecting rulers.

However, not all the reasons for which people complain about elections are good reasons: some are based on a misunderstanding of elections as a mechanism by which we make collective decisions. Politicians indeed try to persuade and seduce, but they look at the surveys and the encounter groups, they gauge the winds of public opinion, and then try to guess what we want. They offer them because they believe these policies are what a majority of us want. Parties promise what they think would make them most likely to win. Had a majority wanted something different, competing parties would have offered something different. Hence, the electorate, as a collectivity, chooses even when none of us has a choice at the polling place.

Voting is not an action that makes individuals feel empowered, but this is not a valid reason for complaint. In a large electorate, no one can say 'I voted for A, so A won.' In fact, we cast our votes and then rush home and turn on the TV to learn, often uncertain late into the night, who won. From the individual point of view, the results of an election are like those of flipping a coin: there is no causal relation between action and outcome. The value of elections is not that each voter has real influence on the final result, but that collective choice is made by summing the total of individual wills. Even if individuals see their own vote as ineffective, they should value voting as a procedure for making collective choices, and there is dramatic evidence that often they do: some people have sacrificed their lives for the ideal of free elections. To value elections, it is sufficient that 'Both governors and governed must recognize ‘will-revealing’ procedures and view them as communicating instructions, which governing agencies are then expected to execute as a matter of course'.

We value elections because they are the second best to what we would really like: each of us being free to do whatever one wants. We have to live together and to live together we must be governed. No one likes to be ordered to do what one does not want to do or to be forbidden to do what one wants to, but governed we must be. And because we cannot all govern at the same time, at best we can choose by whom and how we would be governed, reserving the right to get rid of governments we do not like. This is what elections enable us to do.

Something is interesting about Cicero's letter to Quintus Marco Fratri:

'Et petitio magistratus divisa est in duarum rationum diligentiam, quarum altera in amicorum studiis, altera in populari voluntate ponenda est. amicorum studia beneficiis et officiis et vetustate et facilitate ac iucunditate naturae parta esse oportet. Sed hoc nomen amicorum in petitione latius patet quam in cetera vita. Quisquis est enim qui ostendat aliquid in te voluntatis, qui colat, qui domum ventitet, is in ami- corum numero est habendus. Sed tamen, qui sunt amici ex causa iustiore cognationis aut adfinitatis aut sodalitatis aut alicuius necessitudinis, iis carum et iucundum esse maxime prodest.'

[Running for office can be divided into two kinds of activity: securing the support of your friends and winning over the general public. You gain the goodwill of friends through kindness, favors, old connections, availability, and natural charm. But in an election, you need to think of friendship in broader terms than in everyday life. For a candidate, a friend is anyone who shows you goodwill or seeks out your company. But don’t neglect those who are your friends in the traditional sense through family ties or social connections. These you must continue to carefully cultivate.]

We'll go on again on the next session, bi 'idhnillah."

And before moving on to the next session, Maple sang,

Have you seen the little piggies

crawling in the dirt?

And for all the little piggies

life is getting worse

Always having dirt to play around in *)

Citations & References:

- Guy S. Goodwin-Gill, Free and Fair Elections, 2006, Inter-Parliamentary Union

- Andrew H. Sidman, Pork Barrel Politics: How Government Spending Determines Elections in a Polarized Era, 2019, Columbia University Press

- Quintus Tullius Cicero, How to Win an Election: An ancient Guide for Modern Politicians, translated and with an introduction by Philip Freeman, 2012, Princeton University Press

*) "Piggies" written by George Harrison

[Episode 3]

[Episode 1]

Bahasa

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]

Bahasa