How Authoritarian Governments Rig Elections to Stay in Power
President Nicolás Maduro was declared the winner of Venezuela’s presidential vote on Monday despite glaring election irregularities, plunging the country into widespread protests.
The vote came after millions of Venezuelans had rallied behind the opposition candidate, Edmundo González, who stood in for the popular opposition leader, María Corina Machado, who was barred from running by Mr. Maduro’s government. Mr. Maduro was declared the winner by the country’s electoral authority, which did not release a full vote count, fueling suspicions about the credibility Mr. Maduro’s claim of victory.
Ms. Machado called the results “impossible,” and many pointed to government interference at polling stations.
This is not the first time Mr. Maduro’s administration has been accused of reporting false election results. Like other authoritarian leaders across the world, Mr. Maduro has employed myriad tactics to rig elections in an attempt to garner legitimacy by skewing the democratic process.
Here are five different ways authoritarian governments can rig elections.
Co-opting different arms of the government.
Co-opting different arms of the government, such as the judiciary or its legislative body is a common tool used by authoritarian governments to rig elections.
Experts at the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, or IFES, an international nonprofit based in the United States, pointed to El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, as an example. Mr. Bukele’s government instituted changes that allowed the country’s legislative body to pass laws more favorable to his government. With a supermajority in the legislature, Mr. Bukele’s party replaced judges on the Supreme Court, which then reinterpreted the country’s Constitution and allowed him to run for re-election despite a ban on presidents serving consecutive terms.
When authoritarian leaders consolidate power by gaining control over the judiciary or the legislature, they “have a whole biased institution to rule in their favor,” said Fernanda Buril, the group’s deputy director.
Máximo Zaldívar, the IFES’s regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, agreed, adding, “the fraud doesn’t happen overnight, it’s a systematic and prolonged process.” He said authoritarian governments ask, “do we have the judiciary? Check. Do we have the army? Check. They check those boxes off until they can execute the master plan.”
Culling candidates.
Authoritarian governments across the world have often sought to control election outcomes by dictating which candidates can run. Mr. Maduro’s government used the courts to ban the charismatic Ms. Machado from the presidential ballot, leading her party to use Mr. González, a little-known diplomat, as a replacement.
Iran’s repressive theocracy consolidates power and controls elections by only allowing candidates vetted by the Guardian Council, a 12-person group of jurists and clerics, to run. This year, the council disqualified multiple women, a former president and many government officials from running, whittling a list of 80 down to just six candidates who were allowed to run for president.
In Pakistan, the government imprisoned the popular opposition leader Imran Khan, and has threatened to ban the Mr. Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf, or P.T.I. party. The country’s powerful military has been accused of rigging dozens of elections against the broadly popular P.T.I.
Creating a culture of fear.
Authoritarian governments also try to manipulate elections by striking fear in voters. In Venezuela, Mr. Maduro darkly warned of a “blood bath” if his party lost, a threat that bears real teeth: in 2017, National Guard troops and Maduro-aligned militias violently quelled protests against his government.
In Russia, President Vladimir V. Putin, banned public demonstrations and jailed his most prominent critic, Aleksei A. Navalny, and other opponents as a warning to those who might question his rule.
In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has notoriously quelled dissent through state-sponsored violence, imprisoning those who have protested against him in a system of prisons known for carrying out torture and extrajudicial killings.
Buying votes and stuffing ballots.
Some authoritarian governments buy votes to keep control. Paraguay’s Colorado Party has maintained power for 70 years in part by rounding up Indigenous people and paying them to vote for the right-wing party.
On a smaller scale, political parties in Mexico have handed out gift cards and other items to win elections, while in the Philippines, international observers have said the 2022 national elections were rife with “blatant vote-buying.”
Limiting outside observers.
At some Venezuelan voting stations, officials refused to provide paper tallies of votes to election monitors, prohibiting outside observers from being able verify election results at different voting sites. Mr. Maduro’s government also expelled the diplomatic missions of seven Latin American countries that decried the official election announcement.
In Syria’s 2014 election, President al-Assad used outside observers — but from authoritarian nations, including North Korea, Iran and Russia — to portray the voting as having been conducted legitimately.
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