The elections in Russia earlier this month were widely condemned as a performance somewhere between tragedy and farce. Although President Vladimir Putin enjoys substantial public support, the mood was staged to ensure that he would be “re-elected” with more than 87 percent of the vote.
And the outcome was decided long before Russians even arrived at the polls: political opposition has been ruthlessly crushed, independent media silenced, and public protesters given draconian prison sentences. Russia’s most prominent opposition politician, Alexei Navalnydied in prison last month.
All of this raises an interesting question: why do autocratic leaders even bother organizing rigged elections?
Fake results, real messages
It may be useful to view elections in autocratic states as a propaganda exercise, aimed at multiple audiences. Fixing a vote can be a way for an incumbent like Putin to demonstrate his control over the instruments of power: there is value in demonstrating that bureaucratic bodies, local governments, security forces and the media are loyal (or intimidated) enough to to participate in such elections. a substantial, expensive and complex project.
This scrutiny can also serve as a warning to the opposition and all its potential allies, underscoring the apparent futility of protest. “When you have an 87 percent victory you think: ‘Do I really want to die, when this is just pointless because he has such an iron grip on power?’” Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London and co -author of the book “How to manipulate an election.” “Part of that is actually showing dominance over the domestic sphere and deterring opposition.”
The public may know that the election was rigged, but may not know to what extent. So even rigged elections can contribute to the image of a leader’s popularity, especially if the press is already fiercely loyal, Klaas said.
The foreign audience is also important. Just as states that violate human rights often create mock courts To create the illusion of accountability, making it less embarrassing for allies to continue supporting them, autocratic regimes sometimes use rigged elections to make their allies claim that they support an “elected” government.
That’s probably less of a consideration for Russia, it was heavily sanctioned by Western countries after the country launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and is now looking to autocratic states like China and North Korea for support. But for countries that rely more on help from democratic allies, holding some form of election could be a crucial element in maintaining that support.
Knowledge is power
Elections can also be an essential source of information. “Dictators are victims of their own repression because no one tells them the truth,” Klaas said. “So one thing dictators do is they use elections as a proxy to find out how popular they really are.”
Allowing some campaign and a few other names on the ballot can provide insight into a leader’s actual appeal — even if the government then adjusts the results to prevent the real information from ever becoming public.
The process can also help leaders identify opposition figures who could pose a threat. For example, Putin has cracked down on the emerging opposition and protest movement that formed around the 2011 Russian elections, using arrests, forced exile, and other repressive methods to further concentrate power in his own hands.
But that method can sometimes backfire. Researchers have found that simply holding elections can open the door to eventual regime change, even if these elections were intended to do the opposite.
The risk for autocrats
Research by Beatriz Magaloni, a political scientist at Stanford, shows that stolen elections can sometimes lead to “citizen revolutions,” where the attempted manipulation leads to mass protests, which then lead to the military and other elite allies abandoning the incumbent regime and calling it a day. force office. That was, for example, what happened during the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004, and the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia in 2003.
That, of course, remains a fairly unusual outcome. Ukraine and Georgia, for example, had much more substantial political opposition than in Russia, where Putin has ruthlessly prevented opposition figures like Navalny from even getting to the vote. Attempts to spark a similar revolution in Russia after the 2011 elections failed, and the crackdown on dissent that followed would now make such a movement much more difficult to form.
Sometimes, when the opposition unites, a vote that is intended as a rigged achievement can become a real battle. Yahya Jammeh ruled Gambia for decades, using repression and torture to silence dissent and crush political opposition. He was used to ‘winning’ elections with more than 70 percent of the vote and expected the same result in 2016. But instead he lost.
The opposition managed to unite around one candidate, Adama Barrow, owner of a real estate company. The large Gambian diaspora abroad gave his campaign the resources it needed, and some of the manipulation methods Jammeh apparently relied on failed: a warehouse believed to contain fake voter IDs intended to facilitate election manipulation was burned down in the event of an arson just before the elections, leaving too little time to make more. When it became clear that the votes were in favor of the opposition, the head of the election commission reported the results, despite government pressure to stop.
And while foreign allies may be willing to look the other way when elections are manipulated or rigged, they are much stronger standards against actually nullifying results. Jammeh’s appeal to other African leaders to keep him in office fell on deaf ears, and they supported Barrow. A few weeks after the elections, foreign troops from ECOWAS, a regional organization of West African countries, entered the country to help force him out of office.
But such electoral revolutions are rare, and may become increasingly rare. Recent decades, Klaas said, have led to a period of “authoritarian learning,” in which autocratic leaders have become increasingly skilled at election manipulation.
“Only amateurs steal the election on Election Day,” he said. “The professionals really do it up front, through a series of much smarter, subtler ways.”
What I read
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“The War Lawyers: The United States, Israel, and Legal Warfare”, by Craig Jones, is a deeply researched examination of the role lawyers play in warfare, particularly aerial bombardment. Although the book, published in January 2021, predates the current military operation in Gaza, the legal and operational issues Jones discusses remain highly relevant.
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“Rules of politeness,‘By Amor Towles. Somehow I’d never read anything by Towles, despite devoting an entire summer to snobbish novels last year. (Many of you recommended his work, so I have only myself to blame.) I really enjoyed the prose and gently winding storyline, but in the end it felt a bit hollow. Maybe that was the point?
What are you reading?
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