What can go wrong while delivering democratic elections beside a hacker attack?
There is a tendency to look at election misconduct in terms of electoral frauds and cyber threats. Hence, while the attention is predominantly focused on threats from external actors or actors with bad incentives, the increasing complexity of elections and lack of resources and capacities which electoral management bodies face all around the world result in all types of unintentional electoral mismanagement/misconduct which might potentially contribute to democratic backsliding.
This article refers to the recent cases of electoral irregularities happened in the countries with long legacy of democratic elections.
In particular, the recent case of Sweden inspired me to write this article. This year, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) for the first time sent an observation mission to Sweden. What happened that forced OSCE to reconsider their position regarding needs for external assessment of the Swedish electoral process? Apparently, an expat living in Sweden noticed while voting in 2014 European elections that vote secrecy was not fully guaranteed in practice in the Swedish polling stations an filed a complaint regarding the issue to the European Commission. Not that he was experiencing some extraordinary events, but that comment mainly referred to the well-established procedure of delivering elections in Sweden. Before that, nobody actually paid significant attention to this aspect of the Swedish electoral process.
Below, I try to summarize the most common types of electoral irregularities with the purpose of raising awareness that this is probably not an exception, but a new rule in the circumstances of increasingly more complex elections.
1. Lost votes
One of the most common problem when delivering elections is to lose votes. In some countries, a polling station might be required to proceed around 20000 paper ballots over night (see the case of New South Wales in Australia). Moreover, the format of paper ballots do vary over countries. In some of them, a paper ballot might reach 1 meter in one dimension (see Dutch ballots here or Australian ballots here). Hence, storage and transportation of this kind of ballots might be problematic, and history knows many examples of how mismanagement of ballots might lead to loss of ballots:
- Store ballots in the rubbish bags during counting process and later accidentally throw them away confusing with rubbish (Australia 2014);
- Transport ballots in an open truck and not notice 1 400 of ballot papers fell of the truck (Australia 2014);
- Leave a truck with 200 000 ballots unattended in London and get it stolen and not found. Luckily, it happened before ballots were filled by voters (UK 2015);
- Forget to include a part of votes into final count (UK 2017);
- Outsource delivery of postal votes and get in a situation when postal votes were never delivered (Sweden 2018, UK 2017, US 2017).
2. Lost voters
This type of misconduct mainly refers to electoral irregularities happening to the electoral roll/list of voters. The most common problems are: 1) incorrect lists of voters according to which eligible voters could not actually vote and 2) weak rules regarding voter identification which entitles an electoral official to decide who is eligible to get a ballot/which ballot will be counted. Irregularities with electoral roll may result in disenfranchisement of affected voters. Such irregularities frequently made news in the following countries:
USA. This week a scandal happened in Texas where around 2,400 submitted voter registration forms were claimed to be rejected by the Electoral Commission just a week before the registration deadline. Before that, large-scale irregularities with voter lists happened in North Carolina 2016, Georgia 2014;
United Kingdom has a very liberal policy regarding voter identification. Unlike in other countries where besides an ID document a voter might also need to have a voting card, in the UK a voter only needs to name herself and provide an address or date of birth to get a ballot (unless you are in the Northern Ireland where photo identification document is required).
- Before 2014, a head of a household was responsible for voter registration of everybody living at the address. Hence, an ordinary voter had no control over the voter registration process. Since 2014, the procedure allows individual registration online, but it still causes problems sometimes. Moreover, transfer of information from the old registration system to a new one resulted in a loss of approximately 1 mln voters;
- For postal voting a voter puts a signature and a date of birth as identifiers. When a date of birth claimed by a voter does not match the one stated in a voter list, it is up to an electoral official to decide whether to count such vote or not:
“On postal votes the number of people that don’t know their date of birth, you wouldn’t believe it actually. We don’t reject them all because the legislation actually says ‘If you’re satisfied that it’s that person . . . .’ So you look at it and you think ‘Oh the signature’s the same, the writing or the numbers look similar, alright this one’s five years out, that one’s a month out, that one’s got something completely different’. If it’s completely different you think ‘Yes, you know, you can’t change from the 2nd of October to the 27th of April’”,
(James, T. S. (2012). The spill-over and displacement effects of implementing election administration reforms: introducing individual electoral registration in Britain. Parliamentary Affairs, 67(2), 281–305).
Australia: the policy is very much alike in the UK, hence, no ID is required.
Sweden: by law, a voter should provide an ID, but this rule could be overridden if someone with ID is ready to witness a voter’s identity. It is all about trust, after all.
Another type of misconduct which might result in voter disenfranchisement regards the physical location of polling stations:
- move a polling station to another location and fail to communicate the changes properly to electorate and you get a bunch of voters who will not manage to find a polling station on the election day (see it in the USA 2014);
- or simply forget that it is the Election Day and do not open a polling place at all (Los Angeles, USA*).
3. Excess votes
An extreme to the above mentioned irregularities would be receiving more votes when possible. For such situations, a term of “multiple voting” is used, which means that a voter cast more than one vote and, more importantly, more than one vote was counted. How does it happen?
In the current world, the large share of democratic countries offer to voters multiple ways to cast a vote: through different voting channels (postal voting, Internet voting, TV and SMS voting and others), prolonged voting period (like 2 month-long advance voting in the case of Norway) or by providing an opportunity to cast a vote in any voting location regardless a voter’s place of registration (see Estonia and Australia). Some countries explicitly state that a voter could not cast more than one vote through more than one channel, while other countries even allow citizens to cast a vote through multiple voting channels in order to overcome the problem of vote coercion and vote buying (see the case of Estonia).
All of these innovations bring greater convenience to voters, but also impose additional administrative burden on election administration. The main task while delivering multichannel elections is to guarantee that only one vote by a voter is counted. Hence, the task is to identify what is the final vote to be counted and eliminate all additional votes. This task is very resource-consuming and prone to human errors (as in many countries, this process is happening manually), but it is also not always possible. For instance, in Australia, after every election,when electoral results are already declared, the Electoral Commission through a long procedure of voter lists’ scans comparison finds a bunch of people who voted more than once. Thus, after 2016 election, they identified 18,353 voters who overused their voting rights. However, it is almost impossible to bring such cases to the court due to lack of evidence: as voter registration in Australia is not ID-based, any voter accused of multiple voting may claim it to be a stranger who pretended to be this voter. Hence, till nowadays no multiple voter has been pressed charges, despite the fines are clearly defined by law (a $10,800 fine for multiple voting and a $1,800 fine for impersonating someone else) and new procedures are introduced to trace these type of voters.
To conclude, the aim of this piece is not to “name and shame”, but to raise awareness of electoral irregularities happening in the most advanced democracies. Such irregularities might challenge overall electoral integrity and even lead to democratic backsliding, loss of trust and decreasing turnout.
Elections all around the world are getting more and more complex, while electoral law and well-established procedures — more obsolete. Hence, delivery of elections is becoming an increasingly difficult task, which election administrations are probably not able to address on their own. In given circumstance, flawless delivery of elections could not be taken for granted anymore. That being said, it is a high time to bring our attention back to election administration which has been overlooked by scholars and policy-makers for a long time.
*Source: Alvarez, R. M., & Hall, T. E. (2006). Controlling democracy: the principal–agent problems in election administration. Policy Studies Journal, 34(4), 491–510. P.499.