Ballot box stuffing is very effective – if you know how many votes you are behind, you can add extra ballots or simply invent them, to ensure you win.

Professor Cheeseman has been working on democracies in several countries as diverse as Brazil, India, Nigeria, Russia and the United States and has published several books about democracy, particularly in Africa. His latest book, How to Rig an Election, co-authored by Brian Klaas, is an engrossing analysis of the pseudo-democratic methods employed by despots around the world to retain control. We approached Professor Cheeseman for an interview to talk about the book and explain the trade-offs and the most effective combinations of strategies to rig an election.

The title of your latest book, How to Rig an Election, is rather provocative, isn’t it?

Yes, the title is provocative – and that was intentional.

What inspired it? Anger? Worry? Both?

Worry. After we concluded the research, we were struck – and deeply worried – about the extent of election rigging around the world. We wanted to start a conversation about why the quality of elections is so low and why more isn’t done to stop it. Giving the book a provocative title was part of that effort. The main focus of the book, of course, is not on how to rig an election but on how to stop elections from being rigged.

Your work started in Kenya. A bad start, isn’t it?

Yes. One of the first elections I studied in depth was the Kenyan elections of 2007. Optimistic commentators thought the elections would see a victory for the opposition, and that this would cement the country’s transition to democracy – because it would have been the second transfer of power via the ballot box. Instead, the election became extremely controversial after the process fell apart, and a period of intense political violence led to more than 1,000 people being killed. The contrast between the hope for a better future and the reality of civil conflict was shocking. Ever since, I have been fascinated by the damage that election manipulation can do to countries and societies.

Your statement that authoritarian leaders who agree to hold elections and manipulate them are generally able to remain in power longer than autocrats who refuse to allow the populace to vote is intriguing though I see where you are coming from. Isn’t it easier to remain in power by just depriving your people of their right to vote?

You might think that it is easier to retain power by being a brutal authoritarian and not allowing people to have a say, but this is often not true. Not allowing elections can create a common focal point around which a broad range of civil society and opposition leaders can coalesce, creating a united opposition. Refusing to hold elections can also prevent a government from being able to access international financial assistance. If a leader holds elections, however, it is often possible to encourage the opposition to fragment along ethnic, regional or personal lines, enabling the government to play divide-and-rule politics. At the same time, the process of holding elections can confer domestic and international legitimacy on a ruler, even if this is undeserved, and so open up fresh avenues of foreign aid. As a result, leaders who hold elections and cleverly manipulate them can stay in power even longer than those who do not hold elections at all.

o how do you manipulate elections?

The strategies that we talk about in the book include buying hearts and minds, stuffing the ballot box, invisible rigging, divide and rule and digital hacking.

Which of these strategies works best?

Each has strengths and weakness. For example, vote buying is quite a weak strategy; if there is a secret ballot, you cannot punish voters for taking your money and voting how they wanted to anyway. But it is also less dangerous to use, because vote buying is so common that it is rarely cited as evidence for concluding that an election was not credible. By contrast, ballot box stuffing is very effective; if you know how many votes you are behind, you can add extra ballots or simply invent them, to ensure you win.

Isn’t this risky, though?

Yes, it is a very dangerous strategy because stuffing the ballot box at the last minute is often fairly easy to detect, and so it can lead to mass protests and international condemnation. A lot of the book focusses on explaining these trade-offs, and which combinations of strategies are the most effective.

In the Mauritian 2019 elections, there were many allegations of voter suppression. How effective is voter suppression in rigging elections?

Excluding voters, either by manipulating the electoral register or making it impossible for them to vote, is one of the most effective forms of election rigging. In some places – like the United States – voters have been excluded based on their income or race. This still happens today, often by deliberately not registering certain types of people, for example not spending as much time registering in certain areas, or demanding forms of identification that certain groups are likely to lack. It is particularly effective because it is done so long before Election Day.

While all this rigging is going on, where are the international observers? Isn’t it their duty to call out any irregularities during the voting exercise?

Observers do sometimes call out election rigging, as in Kenya in 2007 and in Sierra Leone this year. Sometimes, however, they do not criticise an election as fiercely as the losing party would like, for a variety of reasons. These can include political considerations and pressure to pull their punches, but it can also be difficult to actually collect the hard evidence which they need to speak out. There are always parts of the registration, vote collation and counting processes that are partly or fully obscured from observers and opposition parties. This is one reason why we need to empower observers with more funds and expertise.

What about the courts in all this?

We have recently seen courts overturn presidential election victories in Kenya and Malawi – a major development.

That was exciting, wasn’t it?

Yes, and world leading. However, this only really works where the judiciary has a degree of independence, which is why we have also seen opposition candidates and parties shunning this route in countries like Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe.

You documented instances of election rigging from Argentina to Zimbabwe, including notable examples from Brazil, India, Nigeria, Russia, and the United States, touching on the 2016 election. Tell us about the case in India and possibly in Mauritius…

I think there are perhaps three key lessons we can learn from India and Mauritius. The first is that elections are never safe from manipulation. Even in countries that were seen to be well on the way to consolidating democracy – or at least a very competitive form of multiparty politics – the quality of elections can be gradually eroded. The second key point is that popular and opposition trust in elections can evaporate very quickly, in part because there is so much of the electoral system that they cannot see. This means that when trust in the ruling party and the Electoral Commission evaporates, elections can be extremely polarising events. The third important lesson is that some of the things that most undermine the free and fairness of elections are not necessarily against the rules. In India, for example, President Modi stands accused of being involved in election violence, which is a major electoral offence, and a strategy we discuss at length in the book. But his government has also sought to maintain discipline among its support base through irresponsible populist appeals and polarising strategies that contravene the spirit of the electoral law but do not always contravene the letter of the electoral law. For this reason, ensuring credible elections is not only about making sure the rules are followed – it is also about encouraging all parties and candidates to be inclusive and tolerant, not only during elections but all of the time. Otherwise you risk the further polarisation of politics and increasingly violent politics.

Your findings are based on first-hand experience as election watcher and interviews with presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, election officials etc. How did you convince these people to talk to you, at times revealing their own methods of rigging elections? Why do they talk to you? With what aim?

It is interesting that people want to talk to us when we are often talking about actions that were illegal or at the very least undemocratic. I think people talk for a wide range of reasons – some because they want to feel important, and so they want to tell a story in which they played an important role. In other cases, people feel remorse and want to talk about what happened because they feel bad about it. In other cases still, individuals who feel they were betrayed – for example by a party or leader who did not keep their promises – want to be a whistle blower to get revenge. So people’s motivations for engaging with our research were very varied – and we always had to keep this in mind and second guess what we were told, taking nothing at face value. And of course many people never responded to our emails and refused to talk to us at all!

In a country where electoral rigging has become the norm, who are the champions, or saviours if you wish?

The real champions of our story are the civil society groups and domestic observers – and often electoral officials – who risk their lives to expose election rigging and defend democracy. This is often a thankless task, especially for electoral officials who are likely to be accused of bias no matter what they do. It is when domestic observers are able to record robust evidence of electoral manipulation on a grand scale and election officials stand up to be counted, that elections can be protected. One of the main conclusions of the book is that the international community should do more to support these groups, including funding their activities and protecting them from retribution by governments who come to see them as the enemy.

Now that you know the disease, what is the cure?

Sadly, there is no easy cure, in part because every time a great strategy is developed to protect elections, authoritarian leaders find new ways to circumvent it. This means that we need to be constantly vigilant, and constantly innovating. One of the quotes that has stayed with me the most from the book was from a pro-democracy activist who said something along the lines of “we are always trying to respond to what happened in the last election, while the government is planning new ways to rig the next one”.

That’s disheartening, isn’t it?

Well, what we generally need is three things: a degree of transparency, such as election results being posted at polling station level, a national wide network of domestic observers feeding in to a central hub, and careful analysis of the weak points in the electoral system, so we know where to look. Once we have those three things, demonstrating electoral manipulation becomes possible – though this may not stop it happening if the government is impervious to international and domestic pressure. This is one reason why we need everyone, from civil society groups to newspapers through to international donors to do more to call out and punish rigging.