Co-opting different arms of the government.
Co-opting different arms of the government, such as the judiciary or its legislative body is a common tool used by authoritarian governments to rig elections.
For example, Mr. Bukele’s government instituted changes that allowed the country’s legislative body to pass laws more favorable to his government. With a supermajority in the legislature, Mr. Bukele’s party replaced judges on the Supreme Court, which then reinterpreted the country’s Constitution and allowed him to run for re-election
When authoritarian leaders consolidate power by gaining control over the judiciary or the legislature, they have a whole biased institution to rule in their favor,
The fraud doesn’t happen overnight, it’s a systematic and prolonged process. Authoritarian governments ask, "do we have the judiciary? Check. Do we have the army? Check." They check those boxes off until they can execute the master plan.
Culling candidates.
Authoritarian governments across the world have often sought to control election outcomes by dictating which candidates can run. Mr. Maduro’s government used the courts to ban the charismatic Ms. Machado from the presidential ballot, leading her party to use Mr. González, a little-known diplomat, as a replacement.
Iran’s repressive theocracy consolidates power and controls elections by only allowing candidates vetted by the Guardian Council, a 12-person group of jurists and clerics, to run. This year, the council disqualified multiple women, a former president and many government officials from running, whittling a list of 80 down to just six candidates who were allowed to run for president.
Creating a culture of fear.
Authoritarian governments also try to manipulate elections by striking fear in voters. In Venezuela, Mr. Maduro darkly warned of a “blood bath” if his party lost, a threat that bears real teeth: in 2017, National Guard troops and Maduro-aligned militias violently quelled protests against his government.
In Russia, President Vladimir V. Putin, banned public demonstrations and jailed his most prominent critic, Aleksei A. Navalny, and other opponents as a warning to those who might question his rule.
Buying votes and stuffing ballots.
Some authoritarian governments buy votes to keep control. Paraguay’s Colorado Party has maintained power for 70 years in part by rounding up Indigenous people and paying them to vote for the right-wing party.
Limiting outside observers.
At some Venezuelan voting stations, officials refused to provide paper tallies of votes to election monitors, prohibiting outside observers from being able verify election results at different voting sites. Mr. Maduro’s government also expelled the diplomatic missions of seven Latin American countries that decried the official election announcement.
In Syria’s 2014 election, President al-Assad used outside observers — but from authoritarian nations, including North Korea, Iran and Russia — to portray the voting as having been conducted legitimately.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/30/world/europe/authoritarian-governments-vote-rigging-venezuela-maduro.html
Posted by Naurgul
2 comments
It’s odd to see the Philippines included in the (full) article. It may have many problems, but they’ve had 4 presidents in the last two decades representing a wide spectrum of parties, and the current one had to rope together an electoral coalition of four parties in order to get elected. Meanwhile the legislature currently has sitting members representing a staggering 23 different parties, with the strongest party only holding 22% of seats and ruling only by coalition.
For sure there’s all sort of corruption and vote buying and nepotism and such, but it’s still galling to see the NYT say “Authoritarian Government Rig Elections to Stay in Power” about a country where political power is so much more diverse than in the US – where only two parties have maintained a decades-long stranglehold on all three branches.
Only 3-4 UN members don’t claim to be democracies, I know two of them are Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Technically a recent one is Afghanistan, but even if the running government aren’t part of the UN, they openly say they aren’t a democracy and don’t even pretend to run democratic institutions, like your usual suspects of Russia, Egypt, etc.
Other UN members say they are democratic but use a different criteria like China and Vietnam. They more own the system they have, unlike Russia were it sees and considers itself similar to its European neighbors.
Also it’s well known authoritarian dictatorships use national elections to see the general sentiment of the country, while something like China uses local elections.
I always found it interesting why dictatorships and dictators even have elections in the first place and can’t just be honest like Saudi Arabia?