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How to rig an election, with Nic Cheeseman
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Australiana is now Fire at Will - your safe space for dangerous conversations.
2024 is the biggest election year in history. Countries with more than half the world’s population – over four billion people – will go to the polls. You’d think the more elections the better, right?
Dr Nic Cheeseman would urge caution. In fact, he argues that the greatest political paradox of our time is that there are more elections than ever before, and yet the world is becoming less democratic. Nic is the Professor of Democracy at the University of Birmingham and the co-author of the book, ‘How to Rig an Election’.
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Transcript
Introduction to 2024 Global Elections
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. 2024 is the biggest election year in history. Countries with more than half the world's population, over 4 billion people will go to the polls. There are the obvious ones of course, the US, the UK and India. The less obvious ones, Azerbaijan, Tuvalu and Mongolia. And the ones in countries that, to be honest, this podcast host had never heard of before.
00:00:43
Speaker
Hello to all our listeners in Palau. You'd think the more elections, the better, right?
Paradox of Voting vs. Democracy
00:00:49
Speaker
Well, my guest today would urge caution. In fact, he argues that the greatest political paradox of our time is that there are more elections than ever before, and yet the world is becoming less democratic. Nick Cheeseman is the professor of democracy at the University of Birmingham and the co-author of the fascinating book, How to Rig an Election.
00:01:12
Speaker
Nick, welcome to Australiana. Pleasure to be here. Before we dive into election skullduggery, I think there's an important premise to this conversation, and that's the merits of democracy itself. Part of the reason that autocrats like to cloak themselves in the veneer of democracy
00:01:34
Speaker
is that it's seen almost universally as just innately good, as an innately good thing. It's the reason why North Korea calls themselves the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. I recall maybe a few years ago reading a book by Jason Brennan against democracy, which I think you'd probably be aware of.
Debate: Is Democracy the Best System?
00:01:53
Speaker
He made the argument in that book, he said that democracy is
00:01:56
Speaker
effectively the rule of the ignorant and the irrational, and too often it falls short. He argued instead for an epistocracy rule of the knowledgeable, which sounds suspiciously like rule of the elites to use today's parlance. Should we be striving for democracy?
00:02:13
Speaker
I think the answer is yes. I think, though, that the answer has become harder to make over the last few years. Actually, it's an interesting question whether places like Korea would actually use the term democracy if they were doing that naming game today. For example, we've seen the rise of China, and in places like Sub-Saharan Africa, the rise of Rwanda, give a real impetus to the argument that it's better to be authoritarian if you want rapid economic growth.
Benefits of Democracy
00:02:37
Speaker
And this isn't the first time that argument's been made, right? You go back a little bit in history, you would see a period when some of the fastest growing countries were the likes of South Korea, not North Korea that we were just talking about, Taiwan, et cetera. Most of those countries, when they grew like that, were authoritarian, not democratic. So you have a kind of historical and a contemporary argument that may be, in some cases, a version of authoritarian rule is better, or in the example that you were just talking about, that actually we should just let the smart people make decisions.
00:03:03
Speaker
And that perhaps has changed the game, right? Maybe some of these dictators and election riggers are actually going to be more brazen now because actually that democratic name doesn't have the same cachet. But my argument would be that actually, if we really look at the data, there were still compelling reasons to support democracy and believe democracy is the best system.
00:03:22
Speaker
The first is simply that it's the system that we know most people want. If you go to most countries, even those where people recently celebrated military coups in West Africa, and you actually ask people what they really want is that coup to lead to a reset for a more democratic form of government to emerge. And the reason they want that is because the vast majority of people around the world like having a say in the decisions that affect their own lives.
00:03:44
Speaker
They also get very frustrated if people tell them consistently they're not allowed to say anything and they're allowed to speak out. And I think one thing that we sometimes get blase with with democracy is thinking, oh, we could do away with it. Sometimes my students say this in the classroom. You know, why do we need it? It would be OK.
Democratic Competition and Performance
00:03:59
Speaker
We'd get things done.
00:04:00
Speaker
I remind them that we wouldn't be having the class in an authoritarian system, because a class on democracy, dictatorship and development that critiques the failures of dictatorship would not be allowed. I also remind them that the comments they made in the previous two weeks, where they were highly critical of governments around the world, would have been very dangerous in an authoritarian context, where someone in the class would probably be an implant from the ruling party who would inform on them.
00:04:21
Speaker
So first answer is yes, because actually most of us value that right to be able to make decisions and speak out ourselves. But secondly, we also know that even when we let these people that Brennan's talking about, the unintelligent, presumably to use his terminology, when we let them make decisions, we don't actually get terrible decisions all the time. What we tend to get is actually an improvement. For example, if you look at it in the global statistics, democracies grow faster and at a higher rate,
00:04:50
Speaker
on average than authoritarian regimes. If you look at performance on things like education and health care, you'll find that on average democracies outperform their authoritarian counterparts. So although it's messy, although it's problematic, although elections are often manipulated and although sometimes the policy debate makes you cringe, the fact that you have that political competition tends to get governments to do more for people than they would if they could be complacent and sit there knowing that they don't need to perform because they don't need to face multi-party
00:05:20
Speaker
elections with the whole population. So again, in a sense, we have to go back to that terribly hackneyed, but no doubt still effective comment of Winston Churchill, that democracy is a terrible form of government, but it happens to be the best one that we found so far. Do we know if Churchill actually said that, or is that just one of the millions of quotes attributed to him that he didn't actually say?
00:05:41
Speaker
It could be a bit like Mark Twain, right? There's so many things that Mark Twain has said to have said, but actually perhaps Mark Twain didn't say. But I guess when you do enough of the really good zingers, you're allowed to claim one or two that, you know, weren't necessarily yours. It's a good line, whoever said it.
Democracy's Value in Authoritarian Contexts
00:05:55
Speaker
It is. I want to pick up on your first rationale for democracy, which is democracy is good because an overwhelming majority of people want it. And I want to think about
00:06:05
Speaker
case study of Russia in this context. I think it's an interesting one to ponder. My understanding is that Putin still maintains widespread support within Russia, certainly over a majority, and that can confuse people looking at it from a Western perspective. Moreover, I would assume that many, if not most Russians, would have a vague inkling if not would be well aware that their elections are a sham.
00:06:30
Speaker
Nonetheless, they still seem to support this regime. What are your reflections on societies like Russia, which perhaps appear to prioritize security and stability over democratic freedom?
00:06:43
Speaker
I think, you know, we need to take seriously what people tell us. And if they tell us this is the system that we want, they want, we should be very cautious about thinking we can go in and impose it from outside for two obvious reasons. I mean, one, who are we to say that we know better than them what they want? Second, we have some experience of trying to build democracies in places that, you know, we were told we hear meaning, you know, the international community, the West, UK, US and so on.
00:07:06
Speaker
that were told, you know, this is going to be really difficult, the conditions aren't going to be very favorable, significant parts of the population might not be in favor of it, and went ahead and did it, and then suffered the consequences of that in places like Afghanistan. So we need to take very seriously your suggestion there. We also, though, need to take seriously the reality
00:07:25
Speaker
that some people might be intimidated into saying that because they've seen opposition leaders be poisoned or people beaten in the streets for taking part in anti-war
Supporting Democracy Locally vs. Imposing It Externally
00:07:34
Speaker
messages. We also need to take seriously how good the quality of information is to people. So on the one hand, we want to respect their rights. They may be smart people. They've got information. They're making decisions. But we also need to be careful because we know that the quality of information is very limited, that certain kinds of criticism are being denied to people.
00:07:52
Speaker
And so their ability to make up their minds on the performance of Putin and how well the system is delivering to them is very challenging. I think where that ends me in terms of where we come down in terms of policy on my own position, which is that actually we should never be attempting as an international community or somebody who cares about democracy to impose democracy anywhere in the world. We should only be seeking to stand in solidarity with people within those societies who are doing it themselves.
00:08:19
Speaker
So in other words, what you would do in Russia is you would lend support and your advice and listen to those people who are arguing and fighting for democracy. You would not attempt to impose democracy through force. And the reason for that not only is related to treating what people tell you seriously and recognizing
00:08:35
Speaker
The challenges that come with actually imposing democracy from outside, it's also actually fundamentally rooted in the reality that democracy is not going to be successful unless people win it for themselves. Right. Democracy needs to have a founding myth, an idea that we, the people fought for this and they are not allowed to take it away from us.
00:08:54
Speaker
And the stronger that belief is, the stronger that founding moment, the stronger I think you can mobilize people when democracy is in danger. If you simply try and deliver democracy by eliminating authoritarian leader and giving people elections, and there is no process of popular mobilization, there is no struggle, there is no sacrifice in favor of that greater good, you don't have that moment. And so actually it's incredibly dangerous to go in and try and provide democracy for people. It's much better to create the conditions that they can then go on and fight and win that battle for themselves.
00:09:24
Speaker
And so both in terms of what's likely and feasible, also in terms of not acting as colonial forces, I think standing in solidarity and enabling people to win their own democracy is much better than seeking to impose democracy from outside.
00:09:38
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. And I want to explore these failed nation building or democracy building attempts of the last 25 years. Afghanistan is the case study. Are there some states where due to political, historical, cultural reasons, they are just incompatible with democracy. They always will be incompatible with democracy.
00:10:04
Speaker
And there is no point ever trying to create those conditions that you mentioned for democracy to
Viability of Promoting Democracy in Resistant States
00:10:09
Speaker
flourish. No.
00:10:11
Speaker
You asked a straight question, so I give you a straight answer. The answer, of course, as always, is slightly more complicated than that. I would say there are a number of states around the world where it would almost be impossible to do it today. But in your question, you include it impossible to do it in the future, and I don't think that's true. I think that actually there's a lot of countries today where we could imagine it being extremely difficult now, but in 30, 40 years of political evolution, it would be feasible.
00:10:36
Speaker
And so I think we have to be really careful about thinking that things don't change. Actually, we've seen tremendous political changes around the world in the last 40, 50 years. So no, I don't think it's the case that we should give up on promoting democracy or encouraging democracy almost anywhere. But I do think it makes sense to think about what conditions exist on the ground and at what point it might be worth that investment.
00:10:58
Speaker
The other thing that I think makes sense is, you know, everyone has limited resources and time. So if you really care about democracy, it makes sense to go to a place where you think perhaps democracy is genuinely feasible and a significant international effort could help that country to achieve the democracy at once, rather than to invest your time and energy in a place that seems right now to be stuck and unable to actually move forwards.
00:11:20
Speaker
And one of the things I always say when I get to us to talk to international governments and international policymakers is international actors and aid, generally speaking, can make a difference at the margins. They cannot move mountains. They are not the fundamental drivers of change. So the thing that is going to make a country more democratic is going to be popular change, greater demands for democracy, fragmentation, perhaps of the existing elites.
00:11:42
Speaker
and a process perhaps of greater education, greater socio-economic change that then generates challenges to the authoritarian state that create democratic openings. What international actors can generally do in that context is help at the margins, help to smooth that process, help to empower
00:11:57
Speaker
strengthen, protect democracy activists, help to design a new constitution, and enable that system to become sustainable and stable, and help to provide funds to enable the government to provide services for citizens. But it can't generate that change itself. So the game in some ways for me is patience, recognizing the importance of domestic factors, not having that hubris to believe that the international factors can be dominant,
00:12:22
Speaker
and therefore not trying to do too much and really focusing on places where maybe that domestic change is happening and the international actors can actually help a process that's already underway.
Democratic Progress in Sub-Saharan Africa
00:12:34
Speaker
What's your favourite example of where that evolution has taken place?
00:12:39
Speaker
Well, I think, you know, I work a lot on sub-Saharan Africa, right? And I think in the 1980s, most of sub-Saharan Africa was governed by a military regime, a one-party state, or a personal dictatorship. Human rights were pretty low across the board. Now, after the 1990s, we had a situation where almost all countries were holding multi-party elections.
00:12:57
Speaker
Some of those Monty party elections were a sham, and we'll talk about how some of those were manipulated in a little minute. But it's also true that actually in quite a lot of those countries, actually something that looks much more like an effective democratic system has emerged. So just to give you a couple of examples, I don't think in the 1980s, people would have believed you if you'd have said countries like Kenya and Nigeria, known for big man politics, known for corruption, known for leaders that didn't have that many constraints on them,
00:13:25
Speaker
would have institutionalized a system of presidential term limits where every president that comes up to a two-term limit stands down voluntarily and is replaced by a new president. These were countries that expected or had presidents for life or presidents who were removed by coups, not presidents who voluntarily stood down when the constitution said they should. And yet we now have that in both of those countries.
00:13:46
Speaker
We also have countries like Ghana that have routinely had now transfers of power through multi-party politics. We have countries like Liberia, which has just had a transfer of power. If we go back in time in Ghana, we saw a series of coups and counter coups, instability, and then a kind of semi-military popular regime under President Rawlings. If we go over to Liberia, we had a bitter and violent civil war that brought terrible conflict.
00:14:10
Speaker
In both of those cases, many of the fundamental differences today to then are domestic, domestic forces, leaders who decided to put human rights and democracy first, a recognition that they needed to be a change. But the international community played a really important role. In Ghana, we played a key role in helping to resolve early election disputes and funding the electoral commission and enabling the system of elections to get better so the opposition had confidence in them.
00:14:34
Speaker
In the case of Liberia, the international community played an important role in terms of providing peacekeepers and enabling the country to actually overcome the conflict and then start on the process of elections. In countries like that, the future looks radically different to the past. And again, international actors did not drive that change, but they were really important in terms of facilitating that change.
00:14:54
Speaker
So I think, again, going back to what we were talking about before, it's really important to keep in mind how quickly that change occurred from the mid 80s to, let's say, the mid 2010s. That's only 20 years. And yet you had a really profound change in how politics looked in a region like sub-Saharan Africa.
Western Influence and Authoritarian Resurgence
00:15:09
Speaker
It's not unthinkable that we will have a significant change in another region of the world over the next 20 years.
00:15:16
Speaker
The thing that comes to mind for me, though, is if you look at the 80s and the 90s and the early 2000s, this was a period of internationalism. It was a period where you had the US as the global hegemon that took quite seriously its role as inverted commas the world policeman, and it was actively looking to promote democracy around the world. It would appear much of the West, led by the US, is now becoming more isolationist.
00:15:43
Speaker
And as a result of that, many people within Western countries are more skeptical about that international role. How does that prevailing attitude change the calculus?
00:15:56
Speaker
a great point. I think a couple of things have changed, as you said. Another one I would throw in there is a growing criticism around the world of colonial practices and colonial legacies. The Black Lives Matter movement, decolonized movement in both academia and around the world has really shone a spotlight on acts of international hypocrisy, Western hypocrisy. And all of that, I think, has really kind of
00:16:18
Speaker
caused Western leaders and governments to have a major rethink. I don't think we have the same energy behind the campaign for democracy that perhaps we had in parts of the 1990s. Of course, it was never the case that Western states simply backed democracy over other forms of government. The role of the French government, say, in the Rwandan genocide is an important reminder that it was always more murky and complicated than that. But you're right.
00:16:40
Speaker
we don't have an international consensus and effort to strengthen democracy. Despite all the democracy summits that are called, the energy and the funding is not there in the same way that it has been in previous world moments of history. And so it's clear that that sort of impulse to strengthen democracy around the world has slowed at exactly the same time that the growth and strength of authoritarian regimes has increased. And so one of the things we have now is not only, I think, a Western world
00:17:06
Speaker
led by leaders that are more equivocal about promoting democracy abroad. But we also have a set of authoritarian states that are stronger, they're richer, and they're networking and supporting each other better than ever before. So one of the things that I think sadly we're going to see is we're going to see the growth of authoritarianism and the further decline of democracy. We've seen 20 years of it so far. I think there's another five, six, seven, eight years to go before we actually bottom out.
00:17:29
Speaker
And my great hope in a sense for democracy is not actually that we're going to mobilize effectively to protect it. I don't think we are. I think we're going to fail that like we're failing in some other areas like climate change. My great hope is that when we bottom out, there'll be a cycle shift. We'll enter a completely different mindset. We're at the minute in a mindset where I think a lot of people are bored of democracy. We talked about this a little bit already, the idea that democracy is
00:17:54
Speaker
something that you can almost trade off or sacrifice the fact that people don't necessarily understand quite what it would mean to live in authoritarian system and i think what we actually need in a way is to go back to the mindset of the late eighties when finding for democracy was revolutionary it was dramatic it was powerful it was captivating.
00:18:12
Speaker
when young people going into the streets were fighting for democracy because it was what had been denied them and weren't complacent about it because they understood what it meant not to have it. And my sense is that we'll get back there in time, that we will see actually the costs of authoritarianism for people, we'll see the impact on human rights, we'll see the impact on global politics and stability, we'll see more refugees
00:18:33
Speaker
More migrants being created will see more disinformation being disseminated, more instability in different regions as irresponsible authoritarian governments come to the fore. And that will lead to a new kind of global revival in support and excitement for democracy. But I think the problem is it's not really going to be feasible to build that until we go through that experience and come out the other side.
00:18:54
Speaker
Well,
Challenges to Democracy and Rise of Populism
00:18:55
Speaker
this is an ideal segue into the state of democracy around the world today. So in the book, you point to data that suggests that for well over a decade now, significantly more countries have experienced democratic backsliding rather than democratic consolidation. I haven't seen the most recent data, but from everything you just said, it sounds like that trend has continued to the present day.
00:19:18
Speaker
In other words, what this says is that across the world, there has actually been a net decline in political rights and civil liberties. Now, is that an unfortunate coincidence, or are there global and common forces that are driving that rise of authoritarianism?
00:19:35
Speaker
I think it's not a coincidence. It's partly because authoritarian leaders around the world have learned certain lessons. They've learned that actually they can manipulate elections in subtle ways that are harder to see for the outside world, and they've been able to effectively subvert the idea of democracy.
00:19:53
Speaker
elections generate accountability because you can kick the bombs out of power in too many countries you can't kick the bombs out of power and that's because you know basically the bombs of worked out how to stay in power and definitely by fixing the system in their own interest perhaps you know you could also say that the international community has stopped.
00:20:10
Speaker
actually coming in hard on examples of election rigging and as a result of that, also the cost of manipulating an election has gone down for a dictator. They don't have to worry so much about what comes next and whether or not aid will be cut and whether or not sanctions will be imposed. And because they care less about that and worry less about that,
00:20:26
Speaker
maybe election rigging is going up and the brazenness of that electoral manipulation is going up. If you look at the last elections in somewhere like Belarus, which were clearly fixed and blatantly fixed, and there wasn't that much of an effort to make it look like a good quality election anymore, maybe we get a sense of where we're going, which is actually elections where the president will get 98% of the vote. Polling stations in some parts of the country might not even open because the pretence of democracy has gone.
00:20:51
Speaker
I think the other thing that we need to recognize though is that the claim that democracy has failed is a legitimate claim for many people in many places. Democracy has gone hand in hand with rising inequality. It's gone hand in hand with lower class mobility in some places, the UK, the US. Some of the people who are frustrated with democracy have a good reason to be because it hasn't created opportunities for people. It's given a great promise that you can live whatever life you wanted, but actually the reality of the economic situation has not delivered that.
00:21:19
Speaker
And so I think we also need to understand that one of the other challenges, which is kind of increasing political polarization, the rise of populist leaders and the challenge they pose to democratic systems, is in some senses rooted in perhaps one of the failures of democracy, which is the failure to actually demonstrate and deliver a version of economic equality to go in hand in hand with political equality.
00:21:40
Speaker
And perhaps Democrats were too complacent for too long about what that combination of economic disenfranchisement and democratic continuity was going to do, that actually people would become on the one hand slightly bored with their political system, but also feeling dislocated and alienated from it, and therefore would become amenable to mobilization by a populist anti-system leader threatening the democracy and challenging
China's Political System and Its Global Impact
00:22:05
Speaker
it. And that's what we see today right in the United States, where Trump is telling us quite openly
00:22:10
Speaker
I plan to be a dictator. I will dismantle this. I will challenge that. I will fix this. No, quite openly telling us that he doesn't plan to be a Democrat in power. And interestingly, that doesn't seem to do anything to his popular base. And that in itself, in some ways, is the most frightening thing I think today about this year, that we have a leader potentially on course for winning power who's openly talking about dismantling democratic checks and balances.
00:22:35
Speaker
That, I think, shows just how great that frustration is and also that complacency about what it might mean to have a leader like Trump do that in a country like the United States. We will get back to Trump. He seems to find his way into every conversation.
00:22:52
Speaker
Before we do, there was a really interesting little nugget there, which is around the relationship between economic liberalization and political liberalization. And I'm interested to detour to China in this respect. So there was a bet that was made by the West Blairites, the Clintonites in the 90s that basically said, if China opens up economically and economic prosperity follows, political liberalization won't be far behind.
00:23:19
Speaker
That obviously didn't happen and it upended a lot of popular conceptions of that relationship. Why did China not become more liberal democratically as they became more economically prosperous?
00:23:35
Speaker
I'm not a China expert, but I have three hypotheses because I've thought about this quite a lot. I think one of the reasons is, of course, that China has developed a surveillance state far more capable than probably anything we've seen in human history. One of the things that that does is that changes the game.
00:23:52
Speaker
I think the capacity of the Chinese state to censor information, to limit what people see, and also to provide basic incentives for citizens to act in ways that it approves of, is unparalleled in some ways. The use of technology to achieve that is so extensive, and I don't think that's something that we really saw that many countries capable of doing in the 1980s.
00:24:13
Speaker
So that model perhaps assumes a relatively limited form of government that has a certain amount of control over society, and then all of a sudden society gets empowered and overpowers the government. The Chinese government simply has far more power than that model appreciates.
00:24:28
Speaker
The second thing I think is perhaps that the Chinese government has done this through a form of co-option politics and corrupt politics that actually means that many of the people who've come through have been connected to the party and are part of the system and therefore have an incentive in keeping it going.
00:24:44
Speaker
And in that sense, what we haven't seen necessarily is the creation of a completely autonomous middle class that is not part of the government, that is powerful economically and can use its economic power and political weight to check the government. That hasn't emerged in the same way as the kind of famous Barrington Moore argument about the emergence of middle class driving democracy in other parts of the world. So I think that in a sense, that process that we often is the sort of intellectual idea that underpins that idea that you just have
00:25:13
Speaker
economic liberalisation and then the politics will follow, again, hasn't quite happened in the Chinese context. I think the third thing that somebody who was looking at this might say is also, we haven't had enough time.
00:25:25
Speaker
That process might take you 100 years. That process of actually creating and unleashing that economic potential that then enables people to be wealthy outside of the government, that then changes the game, hasn't happened. That actually you need a bigger economic crash in China for people to start to be more angry and frustrated at the government. You actually need a longer process of emergence of people outside the direct control of the party. And that all of those things are ongoing, but are going to perhaps play out in 50, 60 years time rather than today.
Authoritarian Leaders' Fear of Stepping Down
00:25:54
Speaker
I don't know enough about China to make the prediction of whether or not that's going to happen. But I do think that we're actually talking about a relatively short period of time, and many of the processes of democratization we've seen in history have taken place over 70, 80 years, not 15.
00:26:09
Speaker
I think that makes sense, and if you listen to people like Peter Zion, they would potentially make that argument with the looming demographic crash in China that may potentially lead to some sort of revolutionary moment, we will see. Before we get to the authoritarian toolbox, one more question, and it goes to the mindset of authoritarian leaders, which you touched on just before.
00:26:35
Speaker
Obviously, in order to create the conditions for a democracy in a previously authoritarian regime, that authoritarian leader needs to be removed or needs to step aside. Why generally is that so hard? Why is it so hard and so rare that we see authoritarian leaders step aside and what is the calculus that they are thinking through in that sense?
00:26:55
Speaker
That's a fascinating issue because, absolutely, if you talk to a lot of people, including, I think, people in authoritarian countries, the first thing they tend to go to is kind of money and the love of power, right? They're egotistical, they love power, they want to stay forever, and they get so much money out of being in control of the state, they can't think about giving it up. The absolute power corrupts absolutely school of thought.
00:27:16
Speaker
And then when you've got a quality of life that's based on all of the things that being in control of the state can give you, you become reluctant to give it up. But I think it's much more complicated than that. And one of the things that we really saw when we were writing how to rig an election, and we talked to leaders past and present, was that one of their biggest concerns was that if they gave up power, they would be prosecuted and persecuted. Prosecuted for perhaps corruption that they've committed in office, prosecuted for human rights violations they've committed in office.
00:27:43
Speaker
but also persecuted because, of course, they may well have been involved in persecuting civil society and political opponents and handing over power to them gives the opportunity for those guys to do it back. And so fear, fear of leaving office. And one of the things that I think you really need to start thinking about is, OK, what would be the thing that would enable these leaders to actually feel safe, to actually think, OK, I can go and know that these things that I'm worried about won't happen?
00:28:07
Speaker
And in a sense, the problem is that in many of these countries, the institutions are so weak and they're so pliant and they're so controlled by the government that the leader doesn't believe that if he gives them over to somebody else, a deal he signs will be respected. Because why won't that new leader be able to tear up the deal and to change the constitution and change the institutions to benefit himself? And so it's the inability to actually make a deal that you know will stick, which forces these guys into power.
00:28:32
Speaker
And that's why I think a lot of the really impressive transitions to democracy over the last sort of 20, 30 years have taken place in the context of a kind of immunity deal one way or another, where, you know, the opposition has basically said, we will guarantee that we're not going to come after you and we'll do that by giving you immunity and we'll actually bring in the international community so they can guarantee the deal for you and they'll look after you if things go wrong.
00:28:57
Speaker
So think about somewhere like South Africa where, OK, the peace and reconciliation process was inspirational and many people talk about it in glowing terms. But essentially it was also a deal where an awful lot of people who had committed vast human rights abuses were allowed to get away with it in order to make sure that they would then be willing to hand over power and to give up white supremacy and white minority government. And that deal would probably not have been done for another 10, 20 years if Mandela and the ANC had not been able to enter into that process.
00:29:27
Speaker
And we see that in other countries as well, that the thing that ultimately actually gets the president out is not actually democratic protests on their own. It's a plane ticket to a neutral nearby country where they can take some of their wealth and live peacefully with their family.
00:29:43
Speaker
So I think fear and finding actual ways to broke the deadlock between opposition parties and incumbent dictators, that's one of the big challenges we face when actually affecting change. And people forget that and therefore kind of don't understand why does it take so long.
00:29:59
Speaker
Why does it take so long to get a dictator who's failing out of power? Well, until that person feels that they're going to be properly protected, they're going to stay there. And of course, it's not just them. They'll probably have a wife and daughters and sons who are all dependent on them, all of whom also want to be protected, and heads of the military and the police who also want to be protected. So the pressure on them to stay from other people could actually be as intense as their own desire to remain in power.
00:30:25
Speaker
The international community would appear to be very reluctant to provide that off ramp to dictators a lot of the time. Is that purely because of a sense of justice being needing to be done or is there more to it?
00:30:40
Speaker
Well, there's clearly a terrible moral dilemma here. Allowing people who've committed terrible human rights abuses off the hook in order to move the country forward and get democracy is something that nobody really wants to do. It's the last thing you would do if you really had to to move the situation forward.
00:30:58
Speaker
But yeah, it's something that I think both democracy activists, you know, civil liberty campaign as international governments all bulk out for good reason, because in many ways we want to hold these people to account. And of course, there's an intuition underpinning that, which is that if we allow these guys to get away with it, won't we then encourage the next set of people to do the same thing, knowing that at the end of their time in office, they can broker the same kind of deal.
00:31:20
Speaker
So there is a terrible trade off here where we actually have to work out how much do we want to prioritize trying to not set that norm that you can get away with this versus how much do we want a country that might be mired in conflicts and rebellion and protest to actually move past that and develop a government that might be more legitimate and better able to deliver to the people.
00:31:40
Speaker
And I think that's, again, one of those situations where it shouldn't be us telling people, it should be us asking people on the ground, you are the citizens, you are the civil society groups. What is it that you think is legitimate to do in this situation? And we shouldn't follow their guidance rather than simply imposing our own moral standards. But it's one of those areas, and there are many of them when it comes to democracy, where there is no easy answer and there's no simple right thing or easy thing to do that doesn't have on its own problematic consequences.
Election Rigging Tactics
00:32:09
Speaker
Let's turn to how to rig an election, the nitty gritty. I'm not sure how many third world dictators listened to this podcast. I'd hope a few, but I'm, I'm confident they're already pretty good with these tactics anyway. So we won't be giving them a helping hand. You put forward, uh, you and Brian put forward six major tactics that, uh, authoritarian regimes use to rig elections to stay in power. Gerrymandering, boat buying, repression, digitally hacking the election.
00:32:39
Speaker
the old school stuffing the ballot box and then playing the international community. Before we look at those in isolation, what are your general reflections on that toolkit in total, how it comes together?
00:32:54
Speaker
I think one of the things that we sort of saw when we started writing a book was that people tended towards the things that were easier to hide. So, you know, gerrymandering is pretty easy to hide in the sense that you do it a long way ahead of the elections, and it gives you a kind of secret bias, right? Because it basically means you get more seats in power for smaller numbers of votes, but due to the way you've designed the constituencies. That's not something that tends to bring people out into the streets. It's not something international election observers tend to jump up and down about. So it's that kind of hidden strategy.
00:33:23
Speaker
Vote buying again tends not to be that recorded, happens on street corners, maybe happens out of the sight of the global media. Perhaps another strategy that's easier to get away with. What we thought at the beginning was, we're going to see a lot of that. Governments trying to use those strategies because they're less embarrassing, because they're less likely to get you criticized.
00:33:41
Speaker
Now, after everything we've just said about the ways in which perhaps international support for elections and defense of electoral quality has declined, one of the things I think we're starting to see now is actually people just not relying on those strategies as much and just going for the all-out violence. We talked a lot in the book about how you hide violence and you make it more subtle and you do things
00:34:02
Speaker
night, you knock on people's doors, you make threats, you threaten to burn down their houses rather than burning them down. You don't punch people so that their brews in the media can take pictures of them, but you whisper to them what you'll do after the elections, a form of kind of subtle intimidation. But then you look at the last election in somewhere like Uganda,
00:34:17
Speaker
where, you know, President Boseveni arrested Bobby White and the opposition leader, but also there were massive brutality against the opposition. Hundreds of people, you know, detained, many people killed, many people tortured, some of those people not even found today. That's a blatant form of electoral manipulation using violence that was not hidden. In some ways, it was more brazen than it needed to be. Think about someone like Putin, who, you know, actually, you know, we see opposition figures are consistently poisoned and attacked in Russia.
00:34:46
Speaker
These are no longer the kind of hidden strategies of the past. That brazen use of the actual kind of violence and intimidation seems to be increasing. So one of the things that I worry about is that the way that dictators look at that toolbox has changed. They've stopped thinking they need to use all the subtle strategies. They're more willing to use the more brazen strategies. And that means that I think we're probably going to see greater repression and a decline in the quality of human rights over the next 12 months.
00:35:12
Speaker
Let's start with the most subtle one, which is gerrymandering. It's probably the one which is most well known to this podcast audience because it happens in developed democracies as well as authoritarian regimes. What is it and where can we expect to see it this year or are seeing it at the moment?
00:35:34
Speaker
Cherrymandering is effectively the art of politicians choosing their voters rather than voters choosing the politicians. So it's the process of designing constituency boundaries so that you're voted for by the people you want to be. That might be because you know one community is going to vote for you in anotherism.
00:35:49
Speaker
And so you design the boundary a certain way to maximize those people who are going to vote for you. And you basically can create a one party district that you never have to worry about losing. So you can get reelected to parliament over and over and over again. The big issue, of course, not only does that create uncompetitive districts and therefore make it less exciting for people who are electing voters.
00:36:10
Speaker
but it also risks creating people who are basically elected by their own party base rather than a cross-section of society. So let's imagine, Will, you're going to get elected next week, right? If you're in a constituency where 50% are conservative and 50% are, let's say, left or liberal, you
00:36:26
Speaker
you probably need to get some votes from both of those communities to be able to win power. It's going to be a dangerous strategy to go right there on the extreme because you probably lose some of the moderates from that group, but you will get none of the people from the other group. So you're going to pitch yourself somewhere in the middle. But if we give you a different constituency where everybody, let's say, is conservative or everybody is left
00:36:45
Speaker
And you get a strong impulse within that from certain faction or minority who are encouraging you to actually be more extreme and more radical. There's no incentive for you not to do that because you don't have to worry about these other voters from another party or another disposition. Actually, in some ways, your incentive is to run to consolidate your base, which means outmaneuvering people who might come through who might be more radical than you, which means positioning yourself further to the radical side than you might otherwise do.
00:37:12
Speaker
So we've got two different models here of how a constituency might work. The gerrymandered one that gives you the inbuilt majority probably gives you incentives not to actually stand as a candidate of all people, as an inclusive candidate, as somebody more moderate. So one of the things I worry about, and the debate on this is fierce. Some people think it's true. Some people don't agree with this.
00:37:32
Speaker
But I worry that in places like the United States, one of the things that is facilitating political polarization is exactly gerrymandering, because it's creating too many places where you can win and be dominant by pandering to the base of one party rather than pandering to voters of both parties and having to maintain something of a middle position. Basically, the coasts of the United States and then inland is the divide.
00:37:56
Speaker
Yeah, and there's a big debate, of course, about whether or not this is just politicians seeking and designing and choosing their voters, or whether it's also the reverse, whether actually in some cases this is people voting with their feet and moving to the parts of the country where they feel politically comfortable. So maybe a self-reinforcing mechanism. You asked where we're going to see this, and sadly the answer is pretty much everywhere.
00:38:18
Speaker
If we looked at the electoral map of every country in the world in terms of constituencies, and then we looked at the population of the world, and then we looked at natural features, we would find in the vast majority of countries constituencies that didn't quite make sense to us.
00:38:34
Speaker
Either we would find some constituencies with far more voters than others. So that kind of principle of political equality, one person voting in an urban area gets the same representation, the same number of MPs as one in a rural area. We would either find that that's not there. So you might get 100,000 people voting for one MP in a capital city, and then 20,000 people voting for one MP in a rural area. So effectively the rule constituency actually in that context has more political power than it should do per person.
00:39:01
Speaker
Or we'll see these weird things like we see in the United States where we have constituencies called things like the Latin earmuffs, right? Because if you look at it from above, it doesn't make sense. It's not a circle. It's not a square. It's actually a squiggly line drawn that looked like earmuffs put on the side. And if you went around the world, we'd see that's the case actually in more countries than it's not. So as I say, this is particularly effective, partly because I think it's kind of bureaucratic. It's kind of boring. And so it's hard to get people excited about it. So despite the fact that, you know,
00:39:29
Speaker
We have one of the most controversial and exciting elections in the United States that we've probably had for a very long time. We are not seeing massive public protests about the gerrymandering that we have and the way in which that shapes the political system.
00:39:43
Speaker
As you were speaking, my mind went to what could potentially be a cousin of gerrymandering, and that is the development of immigration policies in a way that one party may argue people entering the country would have a tendency to vote in a particular way.
00:40:01
Speaker
So Republicans or many Republicans have made an argument that the current border policy of the Biden administration is in part driven by the recognition that people who cross the border once they become citizens of the United States are more likely to vote Democrat. Tell me, is that phenomena something which you think is real and is it spread further afield than say the United States?
00:40:26
Speaker
We might call it the ugly cousin of gerrymandering. I think it is real, and it operates in very many ways. One element of that is the migration story that you were just talking about. One of the things you'll find if you go around the world, especially to places where borders are quite porous, which is quite a lot of states in places like Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the accusations that's often made is that one party or another is busing people from over the border.
00:40:54
Speaker
People from over the border over there who are really from Togo or whatever are coming to vote here in Ghana, or they're really over there in Sri Lanka, not Sri Lanka, it's an island, but over there, they're coming across the border and they're voting in this election and they're being bussed in by whichever politician has captured that vote.
00:41:09
Speaker
And so one of the things that we see consistently is that that debate about immigration and the debate about border policy is also inflected exactly as you said with this debate about are these people actually taking up services and are they voting and how does that play out. So that's a hot potato in many countries and it will be one of the things that will be debated in the media.
00:41:29
Speaker
and on social media and unfortunately it's one of the things that is most susceptible to disinformation and rumors. I saw five buses of people coming across the border from over there and then you go and check it out and nobody who was there seen any buses that day and you realize that this story has been created. So unfortunately it's one of the things that is often used online to fuel anti-immigrant fervor or to fuel kind of put up the border fervor
00:41:53
Speaker
without necessarily actually reflecting an evidence base that that's really what's happening. But the second element of this, which takes it to a much broader and perhaps even even more worrying phenomenon, is of course voter suppression. And this is one of the biggest sort of debates right now, I think both in the UK and the US, where governments have basically brought in
00:42:13
Speaker
state level in the United States and national level in the UK have brought in measures which make it harder for people to vote if they don't have diverse forms of identification or certain forms of official identification. Now, this is a particularly tricky one because of course, if like me, you're in favor of strengthening elections, you should be in favor of this. This sounds great. Hey, everybody needs more documentation. Therefore, people can't vote if they're not on the register. Makes it harder for people to perhaps vote multiple times, reduces electoral fraud.
00:42:42
Speaker
Sounds like a win-win. The problem is that we actually know that that kind of rigging is pretty miniscule. There's very little evidence that that's happened in the United States or the United Kingdom on any significant basis at all. And what we do know is that if you increase that threshold for what you need to bring to the polling station to vote,
00:42:59
Speaker
If we make people need a driving license or a passport, etc., the more we do that, the harder it is for certain types of people to go. So, for example, we know that homeless people, former prisoners, people from certain backgrounds are less likely to have those kind of IDs. And here again, we go back to what you were talking about a moment ago, is this is why it becomes a political issue. Because one political party perhaps thinks that getting those people
00:43:23
Speaker
away from the polling station enables them to have a better chance of winning. And the other one thinks that those people going and voting enables them to win. And so you see partisan positions being created in favor or against these kinds of reforms. One of the things I would say in general, therefore, that's particularly worrying about the next elections, both in the UK and the US, is we may see, as we have in the past, significant numbers of people not being able to express their preference at the ballot box
00:43:48
Speaker
because of these requirements that are there in principle to save democracy and protect democracy, but in reality actually have the consequence of denying people their democratic rights. I will skip past vote buying, go out and buy the book if you're interested, and we'll go to repression. What are some of the most egregious examples of voter repression that we should be aware of and how do you think again it will play out this year?
00:44:14
Speaker
I mean, the worst kinds of examples are some of the worst things you can imagine. We have people being tortured. We have people being shot at rallies. We have people whose houses are being bulldozed and burnt down. We see incredible levels of violence actually in some parts of the world. Places like Bangladesh, I worry about the levels of violence that we'll see in places like India, in Uganda, as I mentioned before, in previous elections in places like Zimbabwe. We see very high levels of state violence.
00:44:42
Speaker
Sometimes this violence is committed by the police and the security forces, particularly when they're repressing protests and particularly when they're repressing movements of people who are complaining about the poor quality of elections. But we also see it being done through proxies. So what I mean by that is often a government doesn't want to get the blame for committing the violence, so it'll find a gang
00:45:02
Speaker
militia it'll pass the responsibility onto somebody else it will be organized informally it will be people who don't turn up in state uniforms but the violence will will be the same they're just creating plausible deniability by trying to move it one step beyond the government.
00:45:17
Speaker
What that does, of course, is it intimidates people and makes them scared to go to the ballot box. It makes them intimidated to actually be able to go and express themselves. We will see that this year in a number of countries, particularly where governments or local candidates feel under threat, and particularly where the rule of law is weak or is often manipulated. I think one of the things we just need to keep in mind there will is that this isn't always about the national election.
00:45:42
Speaker
So nationally we might see leaders who are pretty comfortable who are going to get into power. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be worried about violence, because some of that violence might be actually occurring in campaigns for governor, in campaigns for members of parliament, as close races at that subnational level encourage leaders to actually use these strategies to try and get ahead.
00:46:00
Speaker
And I think one of the things that we really could have done more on in the last 10, 20 years, as we talked about, is try and stand up for the quality of elections and say that where we see these kind of levels of violence, the election can't be free and fair.
Digital Manipulation in Elections
00:46:13
Speaker
Whatever happens in the vote count, right? Wherever the vote count looks right or not, wherever or not there's fraud on the day of the election in terms of the counting, if we see this level of intimidation in the run up, we should be saying that that election can't really be called credible.
00:46:25
Speaker
And at the minute too often, we have this kinds of violence. And then we say, well, the result doesn't look too far from what we thought it was going to be. The election probably represents the will of the people. It's probably OK. And I think that creates that really worrying precedent where elections and violence often go hand in hand.
00:46:41
Speaker
Now, it's worth saying that's not everywhere. We're not talking about all the countries we're going to look at. Gerrymandering, it's fairly ubiquitous. The violence is much rarer, but still, it's happening far too often and it's undermining people's ability to actually express themselves properly.
00:46:57
Speaker
Those three tools in the authoritarian toolkit, gerrymandering, vote buying, repression, I imagine they are pretty much as old as elections themselves. There is a more modern tool at the disposal of the dictator, and that is digitally hacking the election. How does that work?
00:47:21
Speaker
Well, there are three sort of things you can do, right? The first is you can fake stuff and throw it at your opponent. You can create a fake video of your opponent saying something terrible about some of his supporters or a community he needs to court to win the election. Or you can get him saying something criminal and try and turn the public against him that way. So one of the things we need to realize is that we are entering, you know, the AI deepfake era. We haven't seen it used in that many elections so far, but I expect it will really take off this year. So that's one thing you can do digitally.
00:47:49
Speaker
The other thing you could try and do, of course, is really target citizens by using big data. So using the data you can get online to profile people, understanding what makes them tick, using everything, you know, from their Amazon buying profile to where they live to understand what are their fears, what are their hopes.
00:48:04
Speaker
and they're manipulating that. For example, if you find out that certain people are particularly worried about crime and violence, sending them fake stories about crime and violence in their area to make them worried about the incumbent government and more likely to vote for someone who's really hardline on crime. So really kind of sophisticated use of profiling using the data as perhaps a second key thing.
00:48:24
Speaker
The third thing, of course, is hacking into the electoral commission itself and faking the results one way or another, either simply having control of the electoral commission and the data and swapping out one set of numbers for another, which in a sense isn't really very digital. It's, as you were saying before, kind of old school as you get.
00:48:39
Speaker
But nowadays, actually may be hacking in to try and compromise the servers or change the electoral roll. For example, by deleting certain types of people from the electoral roll, people whose names imply they might be voting for the other party, or by trying to actually tamper with the results themselves. All three of these, interestingly,
00:48:56
Speaker
aren't simply the preserve of ruling parties. So most of the stuff we've talked about so far, it's easier for the government to do, right? The government has more access to money, so it's easier to buy votes. The government controls the security forces, it's easier to beat people up. The government doesn't have the same kind of monopoly on digital technology. Fake information, deep fakes, disinformation, malicious lies can be spread by anybody. And many of the most viral ones are actually ones that kind of hit a nerve that are not necessarily predictable.
00:49:24
Speaker
So we often see that the official government PR and propaganda is not what gets retweeted the most or liked the most. And similarly, when it comes to hacking in, that doesn't necessarily have to be the government. That could potentially be an opposition party doing it. So all of a sudden, in a sense, you could say that new technology has democratized the opportunity for electoral manipulation this decade. And that's something that we need to watch. The one thing I would say, though, as a caveat to that,
00:49:50
Speaker
is that we also need to watch governments claiming that they've been rigged out when they haven't. And this, of course, brings us back to Trump. One of the things we've seen in the recent elections, both in Zambia, also in the US, is presidents who lost, despite controlling the government, claiming that they were rigged out by some kind of either deep state or conspiracy, or in the case of Zambia, the strategies that the opposition were claimed to have used. Almost all of these claims that I've heard so far seem to me to be completely spurious.
00:50:17
Speaker
They're attempts by governments to basically get themselves off the hook for performing badly and losing the elections by blaming somebody else, using implausible arguments and data that simply doesn't exist. But we therefore need to be worried that actually the kind of next round of electoral manipulation might not just be the digital strategy we just talked about, but the attempts by governments that are losing to manipulate the possibility of that kind of rigging
00:50:44
Speaker
to claim that they should be allowed to remain in power, even though the vote suggests that they lost. And I think that is something that we will see some cases of this year and we need to be even more aware of.
00:50:54
Speaker
I had an analogous thought when you were talking about the use of AI to create effectively fake evidence that it actually creates plausible deniability for any real photos in a politician's past or any real documents or any real other pieces of evidence to say, well, no, this is just a deep fake. And so there's, there's two sides of the coin and, and neither of them are particularly appealing. Who are the digital innovators in the election rigging space?
00:51:22
Speaker
Who are the best-in-class authoritarians? I think we see a number of people who are very good at this. It seems like certain kinds of Russian operatives that perhaps are and are not connected to Putin are doing this. One of the things that I think we see, particularly in some countries in which Russia has an interest
00:51:45
Speaker
is a growing rise in certain forms of disinformation that appear more about creating chaos and confusion than they are necessarily about supporting one side or another. We have some international actors who are doing this across borders, and I think that's one dimension of this. Then we see some governments that are particularly good at this,
00:52:04
Speaker
And I think I'm really interested in what you were just saying a moment ago. I mean, I wonder whether this year we're going to see a deep fake of a government sort of putting out a message that says we know that X opposition leader just tried to launch a coup. Here's a video of him talking to his senior army operatives on the basis of this. We've arrested them all and we put them in jail and we're not going to hold the election because there's a national emergency. And the piece of evidence will be something like a deep fake video, because that's the thing that they're looking forward to to hang on to.
00:52:31
Speaker
We haven't really seen that happen just yet in the elections that I've seen. What I think is also true is that in many of the cases that we've looked at, actually the claims that are made for what you can do digitally have been a bit exaggerated. For example, there's some claims that Cambridge Analytica and international companies have gone in and manipulated elections by doing the profiling that we were talking about a minute ago,
00:52:57
Speaker
and sending out targeted messages. But in a lot of the places that we've actually done the research and looked at the message people were getting, actually some of what people were getting was much more generic and looked like they were basically producing similar kinds of nasty messages to 50, 60 years ago, but targeting them a bit more effectively using digital mechanisms to get them out there.
00:53:16
Speaker
So not necessarily actually doing anything that is as sophisticated as they claim. And I think that's one of the things, again, we have to keep in mind. People are not stupid. If you get a ridiculously fake piece of information, or if you get told something without any attachment, any picture, any video, you are going to most of the time question that and disbelieve that. And people are not quite as gullible as we think they are.
00:53:40
Speaker
And the capacity of these companies has partly been inflated by their own desire to get business. They have to go out there and tell us they can rig elections and that they can do these things even if they can't, because that's one of the things that enables them to actually get more business. And we need to be slightly skeptical about it.
00:53:57
Speaker
But what I do think has been effective, and I think this is where people are really good, is messages that already play on something that is deeply believed by citizens one way or another. So just a couple of examples, messages in the US that play on Hillary Clinton being part of a kind of shadowy elite and make up stories about that.
00:54:19
Speaker
are on face value implausible, but resonated, and our analysis suggests we're actually retweeted and shared more than real stories about the election, in part because they actually resonate with a deep-seated conspiracy theory that's been there in the United States for over 100 years.
00:54:34
Speaker
In the case of Nigeria, one of the most popular messages that was circulated around an election that we studied was the idea that the president, Bahari, had actually been replaced by a clone or an identicate individual who'd been found in somewhere like Sudan or South Sudan, and basically had been brought in to replace the president, who apparently, according to this, had died. That, again, sounds ridiculous, a bit like some of the things that were said about Clinton in the US, but it resonated. One reason it resonated
00:55:02
Speaker
was that many Nigerians remembered when President Yair Adjua was said to be alive and well, but actually had passed away, and the government effectively delayed telling Nigerians that he'd passed away while they tried to decide what they were going to do about how they were going to manage the transition.
00:55:17
Speaker
So again, it resonated because people were used to governments hiding certain kinds of information about the health of the president, and people had a sense that Baha'i was ill, and therefore this idea that he'd been replaced with a clone didn't seem quite so farcical to people on the ground as it might have been to a kind of analyst sitting in Australia or the UK.
00:55:35
Speaker
So the people who will really produce great fake news and disinformation in this election will be the people who are able to keep their finger on the pulse to understand what has local resonance and then push it to that next level by adding something real to something fake and persuading people that way. And that's most of the time, in my experience, not going to be international companies or the likes of Cambridge Analytica.
00:55:59
Speaker
It's often going to be local actors and local individuals who actually live in countries, understand idioms, understand metaphors, understand the language, and basically get employed by governments to actually produce this material
Conclusion: Challenges for Democracy in 2024
00:56:12
Speaker
for them. And that's one of the things we don't have time to discuss it now, but the next time we do a great episode of your podcast, we should talk about
00:56:18
Speaker
You know, who are those individuals being sucked in to this? The influencers, the moderators, the people who are actually producing the material on a day to day basis. And many of those people are not actually working just for one party or another. They're selling their services to whoever is most willing to co-opt them around the election time.
00:56:36
Speaker
And that sort of new generation of people with that capacity is something that we have to watch for, I think, because it doesn't quite work the way that we expect rigging to work. It's not one party controlling people or the other. It's a set of new talented people who are willing to sell their services to perhaps whoever is most likely to pay them the highest amount. And that means that in a sense, there's a kind of fragmentation of electoral manipulation and disinformation that goes beyond the kind of people we thought were doing it, you know, 20 years ago.
00:57:04
Speaker
depressing, isn't it? And I would add onto that, Nick, that that is a depressingly good
00:57:11
Speaker
primer on how to rig an election. It is, as you have noted, a very big year for democracy. It sounds like there will be a fair share of problems that come with a lot of the elections that we see this year. I think everyone that has listened to this podcast would agree that you are an essential follow to keep up to date with everything that we need to know with elections across the world in 2024. All of your details are in the show notes. Mate, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for coming on, Australiana. Your pleasure. Take care.
00:57:40
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.