What to do when the facts aren’t enough? Finding innovative responses to false allegations of electoral fraud
Guest blog by Susan Dodsworth and Nic Cheeseman, International Development Department, University of Birmingham, UK
As this new Innovation Report points out, populists have become adept at both winning hearts and minds, and creating or mining divisions in society. One increasingly important way populists do this is through false allegations of electoral fraud. Technology may offer civil society some innovative ways of responding to such allegations, but it may also be a double-edged sword. As some of our own research has shown, technology is frequently seized on as the solution to both electoral manipulation and false claims of rigging, but where it is implemented in a way that is not participatory there is a risk that it will be not just ineffective, but counterproductive.
Populist allegations of electoral fraud
Throughout 2016, President Trump famously alleged that voter fraud was a serious and wide-spread problem in the US before going on to win the Presidential election. After the US mid-term elections in 2018, he made numerous and repeated allegations that fraud was occurring during recounts of razor-thin margins in Florida’s governor and senate races, despite a complete absence of credible evidence. Republicans ultimately won both recounts, but in the meantime, President Trump almost certainly eroded public trust in the integrity of the electoral process.
Earlier this year, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan challenged the validity of the mayoral election in Istanbul, the country’s largest city, after the surprise victory of opposition candidate Ekrem Imamoglu. The President’s party put pressure on the electoral commission to discount the opposition’s votes so the result would appear closer, making it easier to argue for a re-run. This strategy was ultimately unsuccessful, but it shows how a populist leader can weaponise allegations of electoral fraud, sacrificing public confidence in elections in the pursuit of their own political goals. This demonstrates just how vulnerable democracy can be to unfounded accusations.
False allegations of election fraud have been made by populists in many other contexts as well, with experts warning that these may well be the most dangerous lies they tell, having a corrosive effect on trust in elections and democratic institutions more broadly. Yet populism itself makes it extremely difficult for civil society groups – particularly those taking part in domestic election observation – to counter these false allegations of election fraud.
The challenges of countering false allegations with facts
The whole idea of election observation hinges on the idea that if they “conduct impartial, fact-based analysis”, observers will be able to detect and deter fraud, protecting and building public trust in the integrity of the electoral process. However, populists’ remarkable resilience to countervailing facts suggests an approach that relies on evidence alone to counter false allegations of electoral fraud will be ineffective.
If the facts aren’t enough, what should domestic election observers do? How can they counter the corrosive effect of populists’ false allegations of electoral fraud? This Innovation Report hints at a possible solution: lowering barriers to participation, in a manner similar to one of the strategies employed by Operation Libero. Rather than simply presenting the public with the facts, election observers may need to aim for mass civic engagement in the process of safe-guarding elections.
Why mass participation is a must
Mass participation in election observation has three main benefits. First, it enables observers to collect systematic and comprehensive data, which makes it harder for populists to claim that their findings are the result of sampling bias. Second, it means that populists cannot simply attack observation efforts on the basis that they are conducted by a small elite group who do not have the interests of “the people” at heart. Third, it builds broader support for the findings of observation groups, and means that there is a ready-made civil society campaign that can be deployed if monitors’ conclusions are not respected. So, while participation is no silver bullet, it can play an important role in the campaign against false allegations of rigging.
There are already some examples where domestic election observers have adopted this kind of approach. In many countries, domestic observation efforts mobilise upwards of 10,000 people, drawing together people from a range of different civic organisations, including religious bodies, trade unions, and civil liberties groups. There is a risk, however, that new technologies and ways of detecting fraud will undermine participation.
For example, it has become very popular for domestic observers to conduct Parallel Vote Tabulations, where they monitor and record the vote in a sample of polling stations – usually around 1,200 – and use this to generate a projection of the overall outcome. This model has proved very attractive to donors because it is cheaper and less logistically challenging than covering the whole country. A country – like Kenya – may have more than 40,000 polling stations, and the convention is to have two observers per station. Smaller observation missions that rely more heavily on statistical analysis reduce the level of participation and may make it harder to defend key findings against populist critiques.
The example of Ghana
A good example of broader participation comes from the Ghanaian 2016 general elections. Ahead of the polls, the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), afraid that the election would be manipulated by the government, invested in a mobile phone app to record the results from every polling station in the country. The NPP recruited, trained and paid thousands of party supporters to be party agents, creating a pyramid system for them to filter the results – along with photographic evidence – back to party HQ. Despite Ghana’s status as one of Africa’s highest quality democracies, some NPP leaders are convinced that this system was essential to ensure that their victory was respected and guarantee a peaceful transfer of power. Without the existence of these results, they suggest, the electoral commission might have bowed to pressure from the ruling party to nullify the vote on the basis of trumped up allegations of irregularities in opposition areas.
The one limitation of the Ghanaian model is that because it was run by the opposition party, it was partisan. Moving forwards, it would be more effective if such efforts were led by civil society groups so that they can be owned by all citizens. When this occurs, technology can be an important tool for domestic election observers not just because it allows them to document and communicate “the facts”, but because it can provide a way of making the entire election process – and its observation – more participatory. This is essential.
If civil society is to counter populists’ false allegations of electoral fraud, finding innovative ways to lower the barriers to participation in election observation will be crucial in an era where – sadly – facts alone are no longer enough.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Susan Dodsworth is a Research Fellow at the International Development Department of the University of Birmingham. Her research focusses on the role of political institutions (especially parliaments) in development and democratiszation, as well as the way that international actors affect those two processes. Susan’s most recent article examines the behaviour of international election observers in sub-Saharan Africa. Her publications are available on her website.
Nic Cheeseman is Professor of Democracy at the International Development Department of the University of Birmingham and founder of the website Democracy in Africa. His books include “How to Rig an Election” and “Democracy in Africa: Successes, failures and the struggle for political reform.” In 2019, Nic’s research team won the ESRC’s Celebrating Impact Prize for Outstanding International Impact for their work on safe-guarding elections and strengthening accountability in new democracies.