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How to Steal an Election
4 Playsin 5 minutes
In this episode, we speak to Nicolás Prados of Southern Pulse about election fraud, election security, and how to steal an election.
Nicolás Prados is Projects Lead at Southern Pulse, focusing mainly on political risk and organized crime. Originally from Spain, he has worked for a number of years in Mexico, before obtaining a DPhil in History and an MPhil in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford. Prior to joining Southern Pulse, he taught Latin American history at University College London and at the University of Oxford, and collaborated with a number of media outlets from Spain, Mexico and Colombia. His academic and professional interests focus on the challenges of establishing democracies in unstable contexts.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to How to Get on a Watchlist, the new podcast series from Encyclopedia Geopolitica. um In each episode, we'll sit down with leading experts to discuss dangerous activities.
Exploring Dangerous Activities
00:00:12
Speaker
for From assassinations and airliner shootdowns through to kidnappings of coups, we'll examine each of these threats through the lenses of both the Dangerous Act to seeking to conduct these operations and the agencies around the world seeking to stop them. In the interest of operational security, certain tactical details will be omitted from these discussions.
00:00:34
Speaker
However, the cases and threats which we discuss here are very real.
00:01:01
Speaker
back correct nine one one what's the emergency I'm Louis A. Prisant, the founder and co-editor of Encyclopedia Geopolitica.
Meet the Experts
00:01:09
Speaker
I'm a researcher in the field of intelligence and espionage with a PhD in intelligence studies from Loughborough University. I'm an adjunct professor in intelligence at Science Pro Paris. And in my day job, I provide geopolitical analysis and security focused intelligence to private sector corporations. My name is Colin Reed. I am a former US intelligence professional now working in the private sector to bring geopolitical insights and risk analysis to business leaders.
What is Election Stealing?
00:01:34
Speaker
So today we're discussing how to steal an election. And for this, we're joined by an excellent guest. Nicolas Prados is a project lead at Southern Pulse, focusing mainly on political risk and organized crime. Originally from Spain, he's worked for a number of years in Mexico, before obtaining a DFIL in history and an MPhil in Latin American studies from the University of Oxford. Prior to joining Southern Pulse, he taught Latin American history at University College London and at the University of Oxford.
00:02:00
Speaker
and collaborated with a number of media outlets from Spain, Mexico, and Colombia. His academic and professional interests focus on the challenges of establishing democracies in unstable contexts. So Nicholas, this is ah an interesting topic with an interesting background. The question we always ask our guests at the start is, yeah how did you get into this line of work? Well, thanks, Lewis and Colin, for for having me. Well, I began sort of my interest in in Latin America when I was in university. Being Spanish, I thought Latin America was a very interesting sort of mirror or distorted mirror image to Spain, we we kind of came from very similar roots, if you begin from independence onward. So I always had a fascination that then after after university, I moved to Mexico, where I did kind of different sort of odd jobs. So I i worked at the TV station, I worked at a documentary production company, I worked a bit as a journalist as well. So I was doing different things until eventually I found my way to
00:02:58
Speaker
to Oxford to try to give some sort of academic coherence to the things i was interested in and it was when i was finishing my detail that i started working part time with southern polls sort of using. Using my kind of historical knowledge to present day issues and.
00:03:15
Speaker
which I found to be very exciting because from a very sort of obvious but but very interesting perspective, the sort of scale of the ah the issues you're looking at completely changes from looking at something that is historically and and therefore inherently over versus looking at problems that are developing and ongoing and you don't know how they're going to end. So that has really sort of fascinated me in this in the past couple of years. and i So I moved from being part-time, finished my ID field, and then I took on a full-time position as as projects lead at Southern Pulsar. We provide strategic advisory to companies working in Latin America. So we look a lot at the challenges posed by different political actors, organized crime, informal actors, et cetera.
Stages of Election Manipulation
00:04:02
Speaker
All right, so let's talk about stealing elections. You seem like the man for the job. When we're going to steal an election, ah it seems like there's some kind of covert clandestine ways we can go about this. And then there's also sort of more open legal ways we can manipulate the legal system to to do this. What in your experience you know typically is more common and is there a more effective ah way of doing this? Is one better than the other?
00:04:26
Speaker
The way I think about it, sort of using your, the the distinction between clandestine and sort of legal ways is there are basically three moments in which you can steal an election. So you can start with the earliest moment possible, which is by just designing the system in a way that's convenient to you. So that way you can start to sort of alter the rules of the game before the election has even taken place. That's sort of moment number one.
00:04:55
Speaker
Then you have a second moment, which is Election Day itself, because when people actually have to go to the that ballot box and like insert their ballot. And then there's a final moment, which is after the election has happened. You can still tamper with the result once people have voted and you're either counting or or I can give some examples later where even after votes have been counted, you can still sort of change change the outcome. So I think If I was doing the stealing, the easiest, the best way, the most effective way is the first moment, is to change the rules of the game in a way that benefits you before anyone has even gone to the ballot box. But for the same reason, it's the hardest. It involves having a big degree, like a massive amount of control over
00:05:48
Speaker
On the one hand, the the legislative, just because it's the place where you're going to be regulating how how the electoral system works, but but also the judiciary, because you are not working in a vacuum, you're probably working in a country which has a constitution and you're going to do things that change the constitution and you're going to need the the judiciary on your hand, on on your on your side. And then perhaps most importantly, after you've managed to sort of wrangle parliament and the judiciary,
00:06:16
Speaker
you need the power to actually enforce whatever it is you're trying to do. So that's usually when the army and the police can become quite useful allies. I think it depends what kind of regime you are and which situation is more prevalent. I think usually dealing the election at at the first moment is is kind of plan A by by a lot of regimes, but because it it it involves so many actors, it a lot of them, a lot of these regimes are unable to to complete it. So then stealing it in the second moment is a bit plan B. And then having to tamper with the votes after they've been cast, that's really the emergency button, like completely panicking moment. Let's try to fix this after it's been decided.
Case Study: Venezuela
00:07:09
Speaker
Are there any cases of election stealing that you would say are the ah the kind of go-to case examples, the case studies that that you would point to and say, this is this is what those three moments look like? I think Venezuela, for example, in the past 20 years offers ah first like a very neat progression from a regime that was very skilled at rigging the system in sort of moment one before the ballots had been casted.
00:07:39
Speaker
to moving all the way to having to steal the election in point number three, which is what we saw in July. and So I'll give some examples of of how this has happened and other regimes can sort of iid imitate each other. I guess how to steal it on on on phase one, kind of, I covered in in the previous answer, so I guess that's more, we're more familiar with When it comes to stealing the election on on election day itself, the Venezuelan regime, for example, they resorted to all sorts of very kind of clever and indirect ways of doing it. So perhaps the most blunt way was just to deploy the military to voting centers. So you have to cast your ballot in front of soldiers with weapons, which usually it's can be a bit intimidating, especially if the soldiers are supporting the regime that is telling you to vote for them and not for anyone else.
00:08:34
Speaker
But you can also mess with where the voting centers themselves are. So, for example, you can reduce the number of voting centers in in neighborhoods that you consider to be leaning towards your position and and devote more resources to setting up voting centers where your sort of loyalists are living in. You can do something which they did in Venezuela quite often, which is to extend the voting hours of voting centers where your loyalists are and close early the voting centers in neighborhoods of people that you think are not voting for you. So there's all sorts of small ways you can tamper election day to make sure that you're you're getting ahead. And then finally, if if you want to do, if you, everything has gone wrong, you've been unable to rig the system, you've been unable to intimidate voters, and sometimes just easily by pure violence, you can, I mean, that also happens just
00:09:30
Speaker
voters are beaten up or or killed and in some cases. So if all of that has failed and still people have been brave enough to go cast their ballot for the opposing party, you can do two things after that has happened. One is to just completely ignore the result and come up with your own number, and which is what the Venezuelan regime did in ju in July for the first time almost ever in a presidential election, which was to just completely ignore whatever was put in those boxes and say, well, actually, you know, we want 55% to 45% and that's it. Just going to have to believe me. Or there is a more sort of insidious and like a before of a diabolical way of winning after losing, if that makes sense, which is you remove the power of the position that has just been elected. So this is something that they did with the mayoralty of Caracas
00:10:28
Speaker
I want to say in 2015, but I could be wrong, where an opposition leader became won the election to be mayor of Caracas and the government could not tamper with the votes after they had been counted. So what they chose to do instead was to take all of the powers of the position and transfer them.
00:10:47
Speaker
to a different office, which they controlled. So at the presidential level, for example, this could be that an opposition leader wins the election. He becomes president. But then before he takes office, you just decide that executive power actually is going to rest now with the prime minister. And now we're going to we decided in the last minute to change our system. And actually, the president is now a ceremonial role. So you thought you were running for one position and we just changed it. So I guess that is a way that you can the Venezuelan regime has sort of set examples that can be followed. And um I'm sort of limiting myself to Latin America because it's what I know best, but I'm sure that there are examples and in other parts of the world that follow similar ideas.
Signs of Election Manipulation
00:11:34
Speaker
I mean, that's the interesting thing about these tactics or strategies. They're easy to imitate. it They kind of catch on. once Once you see someone successfully employing them,
00:11:46
Speaker
it It doesn't take a lot for an advisory to tell a ruler, like, well, why don't we do what they just did in X country that we just saw? And so it's a very kind of sort of cosmopolitan exchange of ideas when it comes to stealing elections.
00:12:02
Speaker
So you mentioned there's a sort of shared awareness of how this goes down. Are there sort of common markers that one can look out for in a country, in a society that might indicate that it's ripe for this kind of election stealing? you know Are there political, societal, economic, other preconditions you can look for and say, this might be an indicator that the society is ripe for you know an illegitimate election shenanigans?
00:12:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think there are there are several. is The problem is that some are very tricky to read as either benign or leading towards this kind of elections dealing. And what I mean by that is ah I would say one of the indications or one of the indicators would be having a regime or a government that is incredibly popular. And that is counterintuitive because you would assume that a popular government is just good.
00:12:59
Speaker
At the same time, once you have a regime that's popular enough to have super majorities in legislative chambers or, you know, basically, record countries have different laws, but they all essentially allow for modifications of the constitution, of the playbook, if you have a majority that's big enough. So if you manage to be so successful that you have that majority, then you can change the rules of the game before the election comes. so having a wildly popular government is sort of eerily an indicator because it's it's it's both good but it could also be turned towards this kind of more authoritarian means. I guess the the morning more are an easier indicator would be when a regime starts trying to take control over the judiciary. I guess
00:13:55
Speaker
struggles over control of of the judiciary or you know what's usually called sort of the politicization of the judiciary, that's a bit the smoking gun for election interference because usually dominating yeah the judiciary is part of a broader plan or rather is part of a broader vision of the state whereby you think that you in the executive should control all of the levers of the state for whatever end, in your mind, is justifies this. So I think that reveals an idea in the executive that leads to elections dealing. Because I guess one of the interesting questions about election fraud is, why would you commit it beyond the obvious answer of, well, just because I want power?
00:14:45
Speaker
Usually there is ah there is an idea behind it, which is whatever it is I'm doing in power, it's too valuable to disappear or it's too valuable to let the other team take it. it's there's There's usually that kind of mentality behind stealing an election, whereas in in democratic countries where elections tend to be regularly fair,
00:15:06
Speaker
it all hinges on whoever is going to lose or whoever is in power thinking, whatever my project is, it's fine without me. you know The country can survive without me. Whereas where you have these leaders that see themselves as you know either the salvation of the country or the project that they want to enact, it's too big to allow anyone else to derail it. And that's when this whole chain of little dominoes begins until rigging an election, because you are your starting point is the idea that you're doing something too vast to be allowed to be overthrown ah in a whim because voters just decide something else.
00:15:47
Speaker
What about the role of the the military and the security services? You know, anytime we see a sort of contested political changes, often people will look at, you know, who who are the who are the military forces lining up behind, you know, we see that we're recording this in the week of the attempted martial law incident in South Korea, you know, whether the military would follow that order or not was was one of the big indicators everyone was looking at. So how how much does that matter in stealing an election?
00:16:13
Speaker
I think the military is crucial for any kind of attempt of of this kind, because it's it's a bit what I was saying at the beginning when it comes to co-opting the judiciary. That gives you control of the rule book, but then you need to make sure you have the power to enforce your new rule book. And that's where both the military and the police are are crucial because it's not a very good situation if you have the backing of one armed body in your country, but not the other.
00:16:42
Speaker
Ideally, you want everyone with a weapon to be with you. You don't want them to be divided because then and you can descend into civil war. So the military is is inherently crucial to any of these attempts. And I think that's one of the miscalculations that a lot of presidents end up committing, which is that they think they have enough backing from the armed forces to to do their core, to just more plainly rig an election.
00:17:10
Speaker
and then find out the hard way that actually they don't have enough support. And then I think that the case of South Korea is interesting in this context or we we saw it in in Peru in I think it was December of twenty two. And it's very similarly that the president decided to enact martial law, closed down Congress and the military just refused to follow him. And similarly, there's been a lot of revelations in the past couple of weeks in Brazil over charitable sonatas.
00:17:40
Speaker
attempt to sort of avoid the handover of power to to Lula, which I think was also in 22, but I could be rough. Basically Bolsonaro thinking that he would count with enough support within the military to carry out his plans to stop ah Lula from becoming president, and he found out that he didn't have support of the military. So I think on the one hand, a lot of these efforts hinge on support of the military, but then we should also be careful and understand that the military is not a single monolithic political actor, at least you know when in this kind of political sense, but it's usually divided in half between sort of high ranking officials or officers and the troops and the lower level officers. And that divide within the military is ah key to to understanding how regimes can use the armed forces to execute their goals because
00:18:37
Speaker
there's not much use in having the support of all the generals if the soldiers in the barracks are not with you. And usually, rulers tend to be successful when they manage to have the troops in the barracks supporting them. You can even get away with bypassing sort of the officer class of the army, because usually, I mean, usually historically, sort of the majority of times, but not always military officers,
00:19:03
Speaker
side with their soldiers out of fear of being overthrown from their positions, because again, we're talking about a lot of men with guns. So the stakes are are very high when it comes to this kind of but power, please. So Yeah, overall, the the military is key in any of these attempts. So you're talking a lot about you know the the role of the common soldiers, the role of of fear and sort of the might of the masses there. I'm wondering about sort of the role of the street, right? Popular demonstrations, mass street movements, we've seen you know stormings of political buildings. What about that aspect? How much of that is necessary to cement
00:19:45
Speaker
you know, a contested political change or an illegitimate sort of of person coming to power. It sort of goes hand in hand with the question of the military. Just because usually mass protests when the army is actively crushing them, it's very difficult to succeed. no I mean, I think there is a limited amount of things normal civilians at R&R can do when going up against military forces. and and I guess, in in a way, we saw this during the then sort of democratic spring and in the Middle East, where there is just a limit to how much ordinary people can do when faced with but soldiers, against soldiers. now I mean, at the end of the day, you are unarmed and they have weapons, so I guess they win. Having said that, what can be crucial is if the ah armed forces in general, if they decide to stand by, if they decide not to take any
00:20:42
Speaker
position, if they decide to just sort of sit and then people are allowed to protest without being shot at. That is a hugely important element because that can decide the momentum of your movement that can just in a more practical sense actively sabotage either the counting of the ballots or any other process of the sort of electoral chain that you're trying to disrupt or you're trying to shape towards your own means. So in general, if the armed forces are out of the playing field, then being able to put people on the street, it's it's hugely, hugely advantageous.
00:21:28
Speaker
What about the elites then? you know What about the oligarchy, the the wealthiest members of society? you know You often hear about elite defections at a critical moment for a regime. What's their role in this?
The Role of Elites and Military
00:21:40
Speaker
That's a good question. I guess it would depend what kind of elites they are, if they're political elites, economic elites. I would imagine economic elites, they they have sway, of course, over any government because they have resources, they have control over usually either business or or media. or So they they have an important say over what is going to happen, where where are events going to turn to. Same thing with with the political elite. When you are trying to undertake any of this kind of mass frauds, because you need you need such a large coordination of actors from the judiciary to just, you know, grassroots support and in voting centers that
00:22:25
Speaker
you need to make sure whoever is in your coalition is supporting you. So if you have political elites at the regional level or at the national levels that are sort of selling their support very expensively to you, you're going to have to still bring them on board because you cannot do this with a fractured coalition. So I guess I think elites play a role in deciding whether they're going to join the team overthrowing the government or rigging the election or if they're going to try to stop it. It's a bit of an unsatisfying answer, but I see their role as kind of diffused throughout the whole chain. that They kind of take different positions along the whole process of going from designing the system to altering the votes once they've been casted.
00:23:17
Speaker
All right, so you're a ah Latin America specialist. We know that's a region where there's been a lot of this kind of political turmoil to some degree over the past few decades. Are there other places in the world or other systems of democracy you know where you think electoral fraud happens sort of more frequently, less frequently, and wearing that sort of Latin America hat? Are there places even sort of within that region that you think are more prone to this kind of thing than than other places?
00:23:45
Speaker
i guess to To give kind of a more interesting answer, although perhaps less accurate, I think any democratic system is vulnerable to this and not necessarily prone, as in it tends to happen all the time. It could happen at any moment. it's it's Institutions are are very fragile in the sense that they're up for debate. And as I was mentioning earlier, that sort of first stage or one of the first stages you need to start tampering with the system is to have huge popularity and have a big following. So any country that allows for that, you are already allowing the possibility of this thing to happen. Because the sort of easy answer would be that
00:24:32
Speaker
there is this propensity in countries that are you know that their institutions are more vulnerable or their institutions are newer. But I think that is slightly misleading because, I mean, we've we've seen what's happened in the US for almost a decade now where things that people thought were unthinkable or people thought that were you know those but this sort of attitude of like, this doesn't happen here, this happens in other places, that's completely been shattered because the realization is that If you're stealing the election and in the point of design, if you are trying to change the playbook, at the end of the day, that's a political question. That's a question of of that belongs to any legislative, that belongs in constitutional assemblies. That's a question of, well, how do we decide to organize ourselves?
00:25:23
Speaker
And wherever you have a democratic system or a system with a judiary ah legislative chamber and at least a notional allegiance to popular sovereignty, that question is allowed to be asked. So any system that allows you to ask the question, well, why are we why are we voting for the president the way we are? Why don't we change this? Why don't we organize this in a different way? That allows you to change it.
00:25:52
Speaker
towards almost any possible type of system. I mean, it's it's not easy to come up with, you know, to turn that into a sort of North Korea, but you can. And and I think in in in that sense, there is no democratic country free from the possibility of of someone eventually building up the capability of of tampering with the with the whole political system to their advantage.
00:26:17
Speaker
I'm glad you've kind of brought us onto that topic, the political economy angle on this. I want to dive into your background a little bit. You mentioned you worked in Mexico, um and I'm thinking about the high level of political violence that we see surrounding elections in Mexico. um So they're stealing elections by sort of modifying the political process.
00:26:35
Speaker
for those elections. But then there's also this element where just exposing the public to intimidation and fear can have an impact on elections, even if the process itself is sort of on paper being carried out the way that it's supposed to be. Right. How does one even sort of measure the political legitimacy of an election in a climate where there is violence and intimidation? It's very, very, very difficult. I think the the case of Mexico is interesting because ah your As you're pointing out, there is this a massive amount of of violence in the whole process leading up to to the election day and and sometimes even going after election day, which is where usually organized crime groups, because they need the protection of local government, they want to make sure that whoever is elected is their guy. And usually the way you get your guy elected is the easy way is you just spend lots of money and busing people to the
00:27:32
Speaker
voting centers and just getting them to vote for your guy. That's the nonviolent way, which which happens a lot in in rural Mexico. And then the violent way is just killing the guy who's leading in the polls and happens to be of the party you're not supporting. In which case, you have a kind of patchwork of democratic legitimacy where Overall, you can say it's broadly, you know overall it's legitimate because this happens in less places than the average. It's not in the majority of of places, but then you do have municipalities where whoever was elected was chosen by unaccountable people and and it's completely illegitimate.
00:28:17
Speaker
There's also a sort of bigger question when it comes to the legitimacy of of regimes coming from elections, which is, and this is something that I can't help but adding it just because it comes from my kind of more historical background, which is the purpose we ascribe to elections has changed from sort of say the 19th century to now.
00:28:43
Speaker
And I think the interesting thing about this is that if it's changed in the past, it could change in the future. So what I mean is that and now we understand elections as to be the crucial moment where we choose as individuals who we think should rule us. And it's kind of common sense everywhere. everywhere But 100, 200 years ago, I mean, and if we go back to the 19th century elections,
00:29:06
Speaker
had a
Evolution of Election Purpose
00:29:07
Speaker
completely different purpose. they They were not about choosing who we think is going to rule us, but it was about sort of making a statement as society or as, you know, in in the case of of i town or a village, as a kind of as a community, that political choices were being taken not by the aristocrats or the elite, but by commoners. So the the purpose of elections was sort of more similar to a carnival or some sort of festival where it was it wasn't so much about you choosing an option, but it was just by the ah by the act of showing up and casting a ballot that you were showing that in this town elections are not taken by the local lord or the local priest, but by regular people. So then in in in those elections, it didn't really matter whether, you know,
00:30:05
Speaker
if illiterate men could vote, if you had to be a certain age, because it wasn't about who was actually doing the voting. It was about who were the people in the street in did this whole parade festivity of the election taking in place. And then then the purpose in that election is to certify that not the nobles but the commoners are the ones sort of calling the shots. To tie this back to Mexico. I mean, Mexico has a long history where the point of elections was not to choose a ruling party, because between 1929 and the year 2000, there was only one ruling party. But it was opening the door to, okay, within the ruling party, which faction should be the one leading this. There was a lot of jockeying for positions that you know usually didn't happen at the point of of the ballot box, but
00:31:00
Speaker
they still submit subjected themselves to elections to show that I can still pull in enough people, you know either by giving them money or whatever, that I can i have a certain degree of legitimacy. So it was it was a sort of way of stamping whoever was chosen you know and behind closed doors as saying, I'm the guy that can still mobilize enough and sort of bribe enough people in towns across the whole of Mexico to come on election day and say, yes, this guy. The elections during the the Mexican 20th century, there were a way of of the incumbent saying, I still have enough pull over most of the population to be able to carry this out. So the election was a bit of a certification of something that had already happened. And that could be where we move in the future. I mean,
00:31:52
Speaker
I wouldn't be surprised if the purpose of the elections in in places like Mexico or or in other places were were to change in the future. and And they're not so much about choosing one guy over the other, but they ah they take different purposes. And that it can be a bit scary, but I am sure if we explained how our politics works to someone in the year 1810, maybe they would also be horrified. So some of it is, I guess, adapting to the times.
Is Vote Buying a Problem?
00:32:23
Speaker
So what about the other side of this, then? You know, we're talking about this idea of trying to shape elections through the use of fear and and sticks. What about through the use of carrots, you know, where we see people seeking election or re-election, distributing gifts, food, money in some cases, and with the intent to to buy votes. You know, a lot of countries have guardrails in place around this, but but some don't. and And what about those countries where it just happens anyway? Yeah, I mean, that's That's such a key part of manipulating elections, which which I find it something very tricky to regulate because the line between open bribery and eventually just self-interest, it's hard to choose a cutting point where bribery becomes just someone choosing what's best for themselves. That raises a whole lot of questions as you make that journey. Usually, clientelism and the ability to
00:33:22
Speaker
mobilize local leaders because that's something interesting thing about elections just because they happen at the local level. They involve someone in high office having to deal with people in sometimes very remote towns. It does mean that you have to provide something to all those people that are promising to support you. and and and And I think you're you're right, Lewis, in having to sort of differentiate or provide the guardrails for what is an acceptable kind of gift or a token, so you know can promise we are fine with a presidential candidate telling a mayor, like, listen, if you get the local party to vote for me, or if you get your followers to vote for me, I'll build you a bridge. I mean, that we're fine with. If you say, if you get your people to vote for me, you know, I'll give away bags of rice to your village, then that, you know, we're fine. But it's starting to look a bit not ideal. And then if you say, you know, forget the rice, I'll just
00:34:22
Speaker
give them $100 to each, then that's where we say, okay, not enough. That's yeah that's buts not that's not there but's no longer allowed. it's It's a hard line to draw because it's a very political line. It's a political question of how are we going to organize the way we do elections? What's the way we are happy with in terms of guaranteeing that our elections are are free and fair? And some people would say that, well, we need to sort of depoliticize this as much as possible. They try to you know rely on on autonomous institutions, right bodies that are not elected. We need to try to take pieces of this electoral chain and put them somewhere safe where you know we no one can tamper with them. And then others would say, well, that's not democratic. The whole point of elections is that the people decide so you know that whole change should be subjected to whatever people want to do with it.
00:35:20
Speaker
both extremes end up leading to very anti-democratic results. when if If you have an an electoral system that is completely out of touch and devoid from any human contact, then it just loses the kind of demos part of democracy. But on the other hand, if it's perfectly fraudulent and completely co-opted by corruption and and political party, then choice is meaningless. So then you also have lost your democracy. So it's it's a very fine line to so draw So I'm glad you're bringing up this idea of, you know, change over time and how we regard elections. I wanted to ask you about technological advances. What's the, what's your, what are your thoughts on sort of the role that social media is playing in stealing elections nowadays? Are there places in the world that you can think of, or maybe the social media angle isn't mattering as much as it is to those of us sort of in, in, in the West right now? Yeah, this is something that I think quite often, I mean, I, I,
00:36:21
Speaker
I sort of changed my opinion from one day to the next on on how I feel about social media and elections, because sometimes I feel like the impact of social media is completely overblown and and and it's completely sort of disproportionate how much power we ascribe to just, I don't know, TikTok ads being able to convince someone to change their mind. ah But then at the same time, it's it's such a huge technological revolution that it cannot be underestimated and it cannot be like it cannot be overlooked.
00:36:53
Speaker
And I find it hard to sort of wrap my head around it because I can see some effects in the aftermath of sort the social media um and increasing its popularity among people. So you can see that you know we we have a much more political fragmentation now when it comes to national politics across most of the world. Just to pick Europe We have so many coalition governments or minority governments in places where they were the exception. and I'm saying just this because coming from Spain now coalition governments have been empowered for a while and they were completely new to our political system. and And I think it's very tempting and I think it's sort of true initially, but one has to be careful to link those new developments to always just social media dividing people.
00:37:43
Speaker
Because I think inevitably it does. I think the impact of technology is so massive over our politics and our communication that it's it's hard to put bounds to it and kind of compare it with something else. So just speaking about something like the internet and how the internet is structured towards engaging people at an individual level and how does that correlate them with the political choices they make? I mean, that's those are very vast questions that require very difficult and sophisticated work. And at a more easier kind of ground level of politics, I think we can see how technology has made coordination, for example, much easier, much faster. and also So this was kind of the lesson again of the Arab Spring of the 2010s where suddenly you could mobilize people much faster than before. It has also made the question of regulating
00:38:41
Speaker
sort of public discourse trickier for regimes because you can control the press, you can shut down a TV station, but it's much harder to shut down a website, for example, that's hosted in a third country. That doesn't mean that there are not a lot of countries trying it and sort of succeeding. So, you know, and in Cuba, for example, the internet goes down when it's convenient for their government because there are some a crisis developing. So governments are slowly coming to terms with how to regulate social media and the internet.
Preventing Election Theft
00:39:16
Speaker
But I think overall, it's um it's kind of the question maybe of our lifetimes. How is social media and technology shaping politics? I i don't know how long it took people in the 20th century to kind of pin down how newspapers were affecting what they were seeing.
00:39:34
Speaker
I mean, the I for one, it's taken me a while, so I'm i'm not there yet. It's taken me more time. We are listening to How to Steal an Election with Nicolas Prados. After the break, we'll talk about saving democracy from election stealers.
00:39:54
Speaker
You have been listening to How to Get on a Watchlist, the podcast series from Encyclopedia Geopolitica. If you like this show, don't forget to check out our other content at Encyclopedia Geopolitica, which you can find at howtogettontowatchlist.com, where you can find our analysis on various geopolitical issues, as well as reading lists covering topics like those discussed in the podcast. Please also consider subscribing to the podcast on your streaming platform of choice, giving us a rating, and joining our Patreon.
00:40:37
Speaker
so Given all the different ways that a bad actor could steal an election, yeah know let's let's kick this off. how How can a society prevent an election from being stolen? What are what are the kind of key things a society, a government can put in place as guardrails around this kind of threat? I think ah we if we go back to the kind of three moments where you can where you can steal an election,
00:41:02
Speaker
I'm sort of confident that in general humanity, just to be very broad, we've we've become fairly adept at stopping elections from being stolen in points two and three. So on the day of the election and then in the counting of the election. We have in general, the there's lots of very good legislation around the world that then you know politicians and legislators can copy from each other.
00:41:30
Speaker
around how to ensuring, for example, that the the institution in charge of of overseeing elections is autonomous from much of the state. And there's a lot of sort of fine tuning how to elect the members of those institutions so that it's connected to politics and therefore democratic, but at the same time detached enough that it's not partisan. And I feel like in you know in a lot of countries, we've reached up a pretty good balance.
00:41:59
Speaker
There's also very solid laws and rules around what is permissible to do on election day, what isn't. but All sorts of legislation around, you know, the presence of armed civilians or even members of the military being present at at ballot boxes, at at voting places. And there's also a very sort of advanced technology in those countries where they use voting machines that goes into how to completely shield the machine from being tampered with how to ensure that whatever the machine captures is that then faithfully brought back to to the sort of central HQ where the votes are being counted. Same thing with with paper ballots. I mean, you have countries where by now perhaps 100 years of experience and practice that
00:42:50
Speaker
counting ballots, making sure that they're not tampered with, coming up with a very solid line of security from you know the citizen casting the little paper to them being tallied towards the the total amount. So when it comes to points two and three, I think we're good, generally speaking. The problem is how do you avoid point one, which is when it comes to designing the political system. And I feel like that's a question that, broadly speaking,
00:43:20
Speaker
to say sort of Western countries have not asked themselves in a while. And I feel it's something that is catching them unprepared. And I see this with a lot of the discourse around populism and the rise on populism, the kind of shock effect of populism where people or political commentators, political politicians see something unusual happen. To me, something interesting about that reaction is the whole aspect of it being surprising, being unexpected, being something that it's not supposed to happen. Because it's coming from a direction that they were not expecting it to come from. And I guess I see this a bit as i part of the kind of broader political ideological sort of movement from from the 90s towards was the present where
00:44:12
Speaker
The way we characterize the 90s or the 2000s, it's very common to just use Fukuyama's end of history phrase. People argue over, you know, well, history wasn't over. And there's a lot of bickering over the point of Fukuyama sort of identified that the conflict between ideologies was over because one had won. And all of the ensuing argument has focused around, well, actually, that's not true because you have China, you have Russia.
00:44:36
Speaker
But what I think is interesting is that um I think maybe we should devote more attention to the point of, well, why are we so certain and that our ideological system or whatever our is supposed to mean, but that, you know, what he calls liberal democracy, why are we so certain that that question of what that is is over? Why are we so certain that, you know, the model of liberal democracy was locked in place in 1991, never to change again?
00:45:02
Speaker
Because anyone who has studied the history of democracy knows that that's not that's not how it works. you know Democracy depends on people, people change. So liberal democracy, it's going to change. So I think you you have to be open to the possibility that the purpose of elections, the the purpose of democracy, the way it's supposed to work, it's going to be asked. Someone is going to ask, well, why are we doing this the way we're doing? And you have to have an answer.
00:45:31
Speaker
And I think that's where very personally, as a citizen for most, I would like to see a bit more attention to, which is, well, what are our convincing reasons for doing the things the way they're done? So I think that's the key kind of critical, difficult question to answer. I feel like the technical elements of Election Day and then counting votes, I think we're we're very good at that. I think it's more the the task for a more abstract question of, well, why do we do things the way we do? Which is which needs more elaborating. So we'll take you back to the slightly more technical, as as as interesting as that stuff is.
00:46:15
Speaker
Let's say we've had an election take place. It appears that there was some kind of electoral fraud. We have rule of law defenders in place. How do we convince people, bodies politic, that what they're doing is democratic and and derives legitimacy from the process, right? So maybe we take it that direction. Maybe you answer sort of, how does a ruler how how does how does ah a rule of law defender prove that there is there was was illegitimacy that took place and you know how do you reestablish legitimacy in the process?
00:46:44
Speaker
restore trust, I guess, in a process. That might be an interesting way to answer. It's an interesting question because I think a lot of it hinges on, on for example, whether you have evidence because evidence by nature can be very powerful. Although to your point earlier, Colin, on technology, evidence can also be forged or people can be distrustful of and of evidence because you can say, you know, anything can be photoshopped or that could be AI. So But overall, common sense tends to prevail, or at least I'm sort of naive enough to think that. So if the evidence is very blatant, you you kind of tend to get enough sort of momentum behind you. But I guess more broadly, the the answer to that question is again, political and do you have enough support from enough people to back your
00:47:32
Speaker
argument or to back your your claim, which can be very frustrating when you have a claim that is backed by evidence and you're having to compete on equal terms with someone who isn't. But you know and unfortunately, that's just the reality of politics. it's It's not fair inherently. We just have to try to make it fair and we don't always succeed. So I think at the end of the day, the only way you can restore trust is if you managed to bring enough of a coalition behind you that it kind of group the vast majority of the body politic. And then we've seen this in in in sort of democratic transitions in different countries where the sort of most effective way of of inaugurating a new democratic regime is to get as much breadth as possible of the sort of political arc
00:48:24
Speaker
to be supportive of of the of the new regime, no matter how ideologically diverse. I mean, that's usually because at the end of the day, the game is democracy, the more people you have, the better is going to go for you. like The more you know numbers win at the end of the day. So if you have a very broad coalition, you will be able to restore legitimacy, which again, it's very frustrating in cases where you have evidence and you can say that you are objectively right. But if you lack that support, that popular support, if you lack the ability to communicate it, then no matter how right you are, it's just not going to happen. I mean, I guess and in in some way of Salvador, it's an interesting case of this where it's it's pretty blatant what what Nayib Bukele, the president has done to cement himself in power and and how much he has disregarded all sorts of laws. But at the end of the day,
00:49:18
Speaker
his coalition is still larger and more powerful than anyone else trying to topple him. regardless of you know And we all know he's is he's not so and is breaking laws, he's doing all sorts of illegal things, but it eventually comes down to whether you have enough and enough support them across society to to enforce that kind of claim to legitimacy you're you're raising. What about outside of society then? If you're unable to get support from within the society, are there international bodies that can rule and enforce on election legitimacy?
International and Domestic Challenges
00:49:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's the question of how can the international community sort of prevent or bring about the downfall of of an authoritarian regime is one of the key questions on on this conversation because I feel like there's
00:50:11
Speaker
sort of a pendulum that goes from we can make, you know, the international community can overthrow any dictatorship, and we're very optimistic, and we can turn any country we want into a democracy to the opposite side of the pendulum, which is, well, you know, it's not our business, whether someone is, you know, killing vast percentage of their population, and we're just going to trade with them, no no matter what, because at the end of the day, it's not our say. So you have those kind of those two extremes.
00:50:41
Speaker
And I think what I have found in in kind of my own research and what I kind of tentatively guide myself by is that the international community is not very good at bringing about regime change. So they're not usually very successful at overthrowing a dictator to and impose a democracy, but they are much more successful at defending and existing democracy.
00:51:08
Speaker
so I think the international community in general can actually make a vast difference when it comes to both providing political and diplomatic legitimacy, but then providing sort of material means for a democracy to defend itself. We can see this from a state of war. you know like you can see We can see this in Ukraine where democracies have been able to successfully pour in a lot of resources into the Ukrainian military or or historically International coalitions have been very successful in defending countries that that were under threat of a coup by intervening very solidly on on one side, but less so when it comes to completely overthrowing an authoritarian regime.
00:51:54
Speaker
How does the society walk the line between ensuring that there are these adequate guardrails in place to secure an election's integrity without taking those measures too far and creating repressive conditions, which sort of are returning predestined results and that maybe ah makes society think that, as you've pointed out, maybe the the voting itself is not actually the will of the society? It's a tricky balance.
00:52:20
Speaker
that I think we will reach a sort of solution to that question from, let's say, post-World War II Europe until now, where you have this balance of having some sort of independent regulator of elections, which is independent, yet still connected to Congress. You know, usually Congress needs a certain supermajority or a coalition of the main parties to agree who sits on this board. So we have this I think we have kind of nailed this balance of how to have guardrails that are impartial, but also not completely detached from from the will of ah voters. I guess the unsettling question is, is this going to keep holding? is this going Is this balance going to continue to survive?
00:53:13
Speaker
Because at the end of the day, it hinges on the perception of voters as legitimate or as fair or as responsive. And opening the box of, well, OK, let's remove this guardrail we have and let's put a new one under the wrong conditions, it can be a very sort of scary question. So, for example, in the US, one of these guardrails that was put in the Constitution back 200 years ago was the electoral college that was supposed to be a guardrail to prevent democracy from, you know, becoming too majoritarian sort of the tyranny of the majority. So they installed a guardrail that for a lot of people now has become obsolete and has to be done without because it's not responsive to people. A lot of the people who think that would be very scared if the person opening that box was Donald Trump, for example. So I think that's where
00:54:12
Speaker
We have a balance. Some people are unhappy. But the the thing you have to take into account where you choose whether they do to open the the the engine and and start fine tuning is A, do you trust the guy who's going to, you know, do you trust the mechanic? do you Do you trust the guy in power who's going to do the fine tuning? Or do you trust that you have the ability to tell the mechanic what to do? And then B, well, is it worth the risk? Is it um Do you think you're going to be better off once that has been fine-tuned, or do you think, well, actually, the mechanic right now is not my guy, so I don't trust him to to rebalance this guardrail?
00:54:50
Speaker
I think it's something we will see and over the next few years where this sort of balance we've reached continues to hold. So I want to tie together a lot of the things that I think you've kind of said about this narrative, right?
Is Democracy Really in Crisis?
00:55:03
Speaker
That the democracy is in crisis now and previously was not. Is that narrative helpful, right? Does that help or does that harm us as we try to think about how we ensure legitimate democratic processes? And to your point, try to modernize those things for the world we live in now.
00:55:20
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, i I'm a bit skeptical i mean of of this ah rhetoric about democracies in crisis. On the one hand, I understand where it's coming from. It's undeniable that we're living a moment of turmoil. But on the other hand, as anyone who does history, the whole thing of like, well, this is new, this is unprecedented, immediately strikes a nerve for you. Like, well, actually, no, this is actually quite common. And and Usually crisis is more common than stability. I mean, if if you start looking for stability in the past, you realize that, well, actually things look stable to you from the distance, but the people living it in the moment, it wasn't stable. So it's, it's very, so I do find, I do find a bit the rhetoric about democracy in crisis. it To some extent, it precludes us from a more interesting approach or a more interesting question, which is,
00:56:15
Speaker
again, to go back, which is, well, why do we do the things the way we do? And is there a better way of doing things? Or or is there doesn't necessarily have to be a huge wholesale change of the way we do things, but are there improvements? Because you are reaching for improvements doesn't mean you dismiss the whole project, you know, there' the kind of English expression of you don't want to throw the baby with a bathwater just because you want to change something doesn't mean that you think the whole thing was wrong in the first place.
00:56:44
Speaker
So I think it's kind of patent for everyone. It's quite blatant that the way politics is structured in in in you know much of Europe, Latin America, and I don't want to say Africa and Asia because you know it's not it's not my... I don't follow those regions as much, but it's very apparent that people are dissatisfied. And I think it's more conducive to think, well,
00:57:10
Speaker
which aspects of it are not working and how should this change? And um accept that democracy has to fit the people. you know Democracy goes with the people just because that's the whole nature of the game. You cannot have the people get used to your democracy. It's the other way around. So you have to accept that as people changes, technology changes, as the economy changes, those changes will then eventually reflect themselves in the ways you organize you you organize politics. And I feel like this idea of you know, liberal democracy in crisis and everything was fine until this vandals came and broke everything down and we just need to, you know, if only we could just go back to 1999, everything would be great. I think that's that's just adding fuel to the fire. It's kind of trying to gaslight the whole population into saying, well, you think things are wrong, but you're mistaken. Things are fine. It's just you don't get it. You know, I mean, it's just you don't understand your own democracy. get and And I think that's that's fuel to the fire.
00:58:10
Speaker
So what keeps you up at night? What is the the nightmare scenario when it comes to democracies? That's a good question. The nightmare scenario is reaching a point where political parties or political leaders are confident enough in saying, you know what, democracy itself is pointless.
00:58:33
Speaker
And we've had enough. And the idea of popular sovereignty, we don't believe in that anymore. That's just nonsense. What we believe in is the state. And people come and go, but the state is forever. I think i think ah you know to to really comfort myself, I think that no but you know when we have sort of new extremist parties, the rise of the far right in Europe I always tell myself, well, at least they're running for elections. At least they still believe in the fact that people choose who the rulers are. Which, you know, sounds like i've not a massive consolation, but we also should remember that not very long ago. I mean, in the case of Spain, just a generation ago, that wasn't the North, you know, like a generation ago, the norm was, you know, people come and go, they die, they they don't know what they want. And the state is the protagonist of
00:59:33
Speaker
the story and then the you know it's the state, the one that has to survive and you know the one that's really guiding things and you know popular sovereignty. That's not a thing. like you You read the the Spanish sort of constitution, although it wasn't exactly a constitution under and the era dictatorship of Francisco Franco. And then in the first page, the people don't show up because they're not part of the conversation. You don't have any, not even any allusion, no matter how sort of fraudulent and and and hypocritical towards the rule of the people. That's just completely gone. And I think what would terrify me is reaching a point where someone says, we don't need people to to organize our politics. we We don't need humans. I mean, I guess that's something that the whole technological discussion could bring about that kind of terrifies me. The idea of, well, you know humans make mistakes. They make the wrong decisions. They're not very smart. or they
01:00:31
Speaker
they choose the wrong guy. So let's entrust our politics to non-human entities. Let's entrust the control of the state so to non-humans. And I guess just in a nutshell, I guess it's just the end of the idea of popular sovereignty that would terrify me. Nicolas, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you very much, Lewis and
Conclusion of the Episode
01:00:58
Speaker
Colin. It was a pleasure.
01:01:00
Speaker
Our producer for this episode was Edwin Tran. Our researchers were Alex Smith and Alexandra Shokjevich. To all our listeners and Patreon supporters, thank you very much for listening and supporting how to get on the watch list.
01:01:25
Speaker
your twenty three If you enjoyed this show, please consider checking out our other content at Encyclopedia Geopolitica. We'd also appreciate it if you could subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, or support us on Patreon. Thanks for listening.
01:02:02
Speaker
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