Election Monitoring
VS. Disinformation
Patrick Merloe
Patrick Merloe is senior associate and director of electoral programs
at the National Democratic Institute (NDI), where he has engaged in
electoral-integrity activities in more than sixty countries. He publishes
widely on elections, human rights, and international law.
Over the last thirty years, nonpartisan citizen election monitoring has
spread to more than a hundred countries and involved millions of people.
It is a tangible and sustained aspect of democratic development, and
it poses a serious challenge to autocrats bent on electoral theft—a challenge
that autocrats are devoting considerable resources to addressing.
The fountainhead example of monitoring by citizens is the work that
the National Citizens’ Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) did
in stopping Ferdinand Marcos from stealing the 1986 presidential election
in the Philippines. More than a half-million NAMFREL volunteers
turned out to safeguard their fellow citizens’ votes that year, and the
group has monitored more than twenty national and other elections since.
Inspired by NAMFREL and early efforts in Latin America, the Balkans,
Africa, Eurasia, and the Middle East, citizen election-monitoring organizations
and coalitions in scores of countries came together, often with
help from the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and its programs in
peer-to-peer experience-sharing and best-practices development. Many
such organizations can now boast decades of hard-won experience in
promoting accountability and citizen participation not only at election
time but also when it comes to the conduct of other political processes,
the activities of parliaments, the delivery of public services, and more.
Citizen election monitoring is not only generally accepted today, it has
enhanced democratic political culture in many countries.
Ties have grown across borders and spanned the globe. More than
two-hundred citizen election-monitoring organizations from eighty-four
countries, along with the regional networks that these groups have organized,
belong to the Global Network of Domestic Election Monitors
Journal of Democracy Volume 26, Number 3 July 2015
© 2015 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
Authoritarianism Goes Global
80 Journal of Democracy
(GNDEM). All GNDEM members endorse the Declaration of Global
Principles for Non-Partisan Election Observation and Monitoring by
Citizen Organizations and its Code of Conduct, launched at the UN
Secretariat in 2012. This document provides a professional and ethical
basis for citizen organizations that wish to monitor their country’s elections.
Sixteen key international organizations support the declaration,
providing international recognition for citizen election monitoring’s
critical role in promoting electoral integrity. Organizationally, GNDEM
provides a means for credible citizen election-monitoring groups and
regional networks to share knowledge, show solidarity, and create peerto-peer
accountability for their activities.
Although examples of international election observation can be found
as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century, the practice became
truly widespread much more recently, as the “third wave” of democratic
transitions began washing over the globe after 1974. The collapse of the
Iron Curtain and the fall of brutal one-party, military, or personal dictatorships
across substantial swaths of the globe brought a rise in elections
that is with us still. While most transitions produced a desire for genuine
elections, in some countries ruling factions do not really want to abide
by the people’s will. However, even they feel obliged to allow voting
of some sort if only for appearances’ sake. In these regimes, fakery is
often part of the electoral package. This places a crucial responsibility
on election observers, domestic and international alike. The credibility
with which they do their work has benefited from its integration with
international human-rights fact-finding principles under the influence
of the 1984 Guidelines for International Election Observing and related
methods that some organizations have elaborated and shared.
As post–Cold War transitions advanced, the sanctioning of international
election observation became a common practice of sovereign
states. Although it is not yet universal, it is now widely recognized as
central to the task of holding genuine elections in the developing world.
An increasing number of traditional democracies have opened their own
elections to international observation as well, which is further evidence
of its becoming a norm. A wide variety of international election observers
may be organized under the auspices of the UN or a number of other
institutions. These include: regional and other intergovernmental organizations,
associations of parliamentarians, international nongovernmental
organizations, regional networks of citizen election-observation
organizations, scholarly groups, delegations from political parties that
have affinity with one or more of the parties that are competing, and
diplomats accredited to the country holding the elections. Foreign governments
also send observer delegations to elections.
Many elections are witnessed by a multiplicity of international observers,
not all of whom operate with the same rigor, consider the crucial
role of the election-related processes that come before and after the
81Patrick Merloe
day or days of actual voting, or have the same level of commitment to
political impartiality. This diversity can lead to international electionobservation
missions that issue differing views of the same election,
sometimes resulting in confusion. Autocrats not only try to exploit such
confusion but actively try to create it through a variety of tactics—and
they have shown themselves willing to devote weighty resources and
remarkable levels of ingenuity to these efforts.
Key election-observation organizations—each one known for politically
impartial and rigorous observation activities—launched at the UN
Secretariat in 2005 the Declaration of Principles for International Election
Observation and its Code of Conduct (known collectively as the
Declaration of Principles or DoP). Now endorsed by 49 intergovernmental
and international nongovernmental organizations, the DoP has
spawned an ongoing implementation process that focuses on boosting
cooperation, knowledge-sharing, and peer accountability. Three UN
General Assembly resolutions have recognized the DoP and its implementation
process for making the practice of international election observation
more consistent. That practice, however, is still well short of
fully consistent, largely because there are so many international observers
and their motives vary.
Observation findings by one or more of the DoP-endorsing organizations
are likely to influence both the people of the country where the
election was held and the international community. Not surprisingly,
autocratic or other corrupt regimes will often strive to subvert credible
international election observation in order to blunt its impact.
Shining a Light into Elections
Citizens have a right to genuine elections, and they have a right to
know whether elections are genuine. The mere avowal by those in power
that an election has been truly and fairly conducted and its votes properly
counted requires blind-faith acceptance, and that is not a basis for
democratic citizenship or genuine elections. In order to be confident of
an election’s authenticity, citizens must be able to see into the various
processes that compose it.
As a practical matter, multitudes of citizens cannot be expected to
inspect personally each aspect of an election’s many complex and largescale
processes. These include the registration of voters and parties and
the drawing of electoral-district boundaries as well as the final tabulation
and publication of results, not to mention the adjudication of disputes
and the regulations governing campaigning and its financing, the
use of media and public resources, and so on. Instead, the “eyes” of
the citizenry when it comes to elections are those who make this their
mission: national and international journalists, citizen monitors, international
observers, scholars who study electoral integrity, and the agents
82 Journal of Democracy
of electoral contestants. It is they who, to change the metaphor, shine a
light into elections and their workings. All these light-shiners must in
turn establish their credibility with the citizens, but that task can have
meaning only when transparency is present. Fact-based analyses and
relevant findings depend on the ability to witness processes and to access
electoral data in a timely fashion.
Electoral transparency, in other words, is not a nicety. It is absolutely
and inescapably fundamental to genuine elections. Just as citizens need
enough accurate information to make an informed choice in voting, so
do they require accurate information about the character of electoral
processes in order to vest authority in governments that result from elections.
Put another way, public confidence in elections is essential to
public trust in government. Moreover, that trust is important for the governmental
stability that elections are supposed to buttress.
The international community has a stake in electoral integrity for reasons
of peace and security. Elections are meant to resolve peacefully
the contest for state power, and dubious elections all too often become
flashpoints for strife. The charters of the UN and regional organizations,
along with other treaties and agreements, provide a foundation
for election monitoring and describe a legitimate international interest
in whether a country is meeting its obligations to respect and promote
fundamental rights in this area.
Incumbent governments, with few exceptions, are duty-bound by
their constitutions and solemn international commitments to deliver
genuine elections to their citizens. Governments also have an obligation
to protect and foster the right to seek, receive, and impart information
(the elements of freedom of expression), which reinforces the requirement
of electoral transparency.1
This obligation holds whether those
seeking to acquire and transmit information are journalists, citizen election
monitors, agents of electoral contestants, scholars, or international
election observers.
Another fundamental aspect of genuine elections that supports monitoring
is the precept that every citizen has the right to take part in public
affairs without discrimination or unreasonable restrictions.2
This
broad democratic principle reinforces the essential role of citizens in
monitoring elections, whether as journalists, scholars, members of civic
groups, or agents of electoral contestants. To close electoral processes
and information to witnesses is to block participation. Election monitoring—and
electoral credibility—thus depend on “open government”
and “open government data” policies.3
Governments that want to count
as democratically legitimate must provide the transparency needed to
verify electoral integrity and bolster public trust.
Some governments and ruling parties, however, may become bent on
extending their power irrespective of the people’s will. They will seek to
manipulate electoral processes even as they deny transparency in order
83Patrick Merloe
to avoid the stigma of illegitimacy. Blocking transparency is akin to
a criminal cover-up. Witnesses must be avoided, prevented from testifying,
or discredited. Distractions must be created and smokescreens
generated to conceal the facts—in efforts to spread public confusion
and make accountability less likely. We should expect authoritarians to
be inventive when creating tactics for negating genuine elections while
hiding what is really taking place. Their goal, after all, is not only to manipulate
the electoral process, but to be able to claim legitimacy while
doing so.
Disinformation and Subversion
When the UN General Assembly approved the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights in 1948, the world had only a handful of democracies.
Yet member states voted unanimously, with only eight abstentions,
to adopt the Declaration, including Article 21’s democratic precepts.4
Since then, the number of democracies has soared, and there is now a
widespread expectation that countries will hold genuine elections. There
is also a general acceptance internationally that the participation of domestic
and international election monitors is part of that norm.
Gaining the “democracy” label matters for a country’s status in the
world. So too, therefore, does the classification of a country’s elections
as genuine rather than phony. Zimbabwe, for instance, was suspended
from the Commonwealth for holding violent, repressive elections in
2002, while Pakistan’s 2007 suspension ended after its 2008 elections
were deemed credible. Fiji was suspended from the Commonwealth in
2006 for failing to call elections and was reinstated after its 2014 elections
were deemed credible.
Intergovernmental organizations beside the Commonwealth also regard
the holding of genuine elections as obligatory.5
The European Union, the
United States, and other democracies take into account whether a country
holds true or phony elections, albeit at times in a lamentably inconsistent
way. When commenting publicly on elections, U.S., EU, and other officials
often cite reports from credible monitors, as do major news outlets.
Anyone seeking to distort or fake an electoral process, therefore, must
worry about the findings of credible election monitors.
In recent years, a perception has spread that the West, driven by economic
woes and terrorism fears, is placing less emphasis internationally
on democracy and human rights. Whether or not staging sham elections
has become more tempting as a result, autocratic and autocratic-leaning
regimes still often go to considerable lengths to cover up their electoral
corruption and dishonesty. These efforts at camouflage add up to a tacit
admission by autocrats that they are obligated to hold genuine elections,
and they know it.
The motives for manipulating electoral outcomes vary. Incumbents in
84 Journal of Democracy
one country may truly fear defeat in a free and fair polling. Incumbents
in another may justifiably expect that they will win based on popularity
or name recognition alone (especially if the opposition, civil society,
and the media have all been stifled), but clientelism or some other corrupt
feature of authoritarian rule may give them an incentive to pad their
totals by dishonest means. In either case, successfully hiding the manipulation
will require subverting credible election monitoring by national
and international organizations as well as journalists.
As for the means of theft, elections can be stolen in many ways. Electoral
processes are not one-day events. They include many components
that occur over a long period of time and involve a wide array of governmental
institutions and a range of rights and responsibilities. How
the processes surrounding an election are conducted reflects something
broader: the respect (or lack of it) that a government and those who
are vying to control its powers have for the citizenry. Election monitoring,
when credibly conducted, highlights both the positive and the
negative—the good news and the bad about how an election was carried
out—casting the electoral environment into higher relief in order to promote
the cause of democratic accountability.
An election’s integrity hinges on a diverse array of processes. These
include, for example, the procedures that are used to document the
birthplaces and residences of prospective voters and candidates, and
also the larger-scale, data-intensive methods by which the accuracy of
the voter registry is verified, the fairness of electoral-district boundaries
is gauged, and the tabulation of results is checked for accuracy.
The freedoms of political expression and organization must be secure.
State-controlled media must remain impartial, the use of state financial
and other resources must be politically neutral, and those charged with
administering the elections must be not only impartial but competent.
Law-enforcement and security forces must remain alert, effective, and
outside the political fray so that parties and candidates can freely compete—and
citizens freely vote—without fear of violence or retribution.
Electoral integrity also depends on courts and administrative complaint
mechanisms that act in a timely, effective manner when electionrelated
rights are infringed or electoral abuses committed. This illustrates
how equality before the law and equal protection of the law are related
to universal and equal suffrage. Removing barriers that keep women,
young people, and other marginalized populations from taking part is at
the core of genuine elections. Enfranchisement requires inclusion without
discrimination or unreasonable restriction. Inclusion, transparency,
and accountability underlie genuine elections, and indeed democratic
governance more broadly.6
Tampering with even one of these pillars of
genuine democratic choice can be enough turn an election into a sham.
Election monitoring must therefore look to all of them, taking care lest
autocrats distort, undermine, or counterfeit any of them.
85Patrick Merloe
Although no election can be perfect, positive indications across the
range of election-related processes point to the presence of a democratic
political dynamic, including respect for human rights and citizens’
freedom to make political choices. Autocratic tactics and authoritarian
governance can gut the genuineness of elections by reducing inclusiveness,
transparency, and accountability, just as authoritarians can steal
an election by falsifying results or—should fraud fall short—refusing to
accept the voters’ verdict.
Denials of access to election-related processes and the governmentheld
data needed to assess their credibility are classic authoritarian
stratagems. Such moves typically coincide with efforts to disable and
disempower journalists, civil society groups, and the political opposition.
News outlets may be targeted for control, social media blocked,
choruses of support for the tainted elections orchestrated, public-relations
firms hired, and both domestic and international monitoring efforts
attacked.
Credible Monitoring in the Crosshairs
Nonpartisan election monitoring by citizen organizations—when
these groups are credible and enjoy proper support—assesses a country’s
electoral processes in a way that is both methodical and reliable.
Such assessment efforts are conducted in local languages and with
knowledge of a country’s political culture. They can extend over the
long electoral timeline while mobilizing and training the large numbers
of people needed to scrutinize key processes. They can detect electoral
manipulation or other deficiencies in elections, highlighting problems
and promoting public confidence where warranted. Would-be electionfakers
must outsmart, block, or otherwise subvert credible citizen election
monitors. Others need to know how to distinguish credible, effective
monitors from those who are feckless or biased.
Autocrats’ tactics against citizen election monitors resemble those
meant to weaken civil society more broadly. They include denying access
to information and producing laws and regulations that run counter
to the standard that rights are to be protected and promoted without
discrimination or unreasonable restriction. Examples include laws concerning
domestic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that make it
impossible or very difficult to gain and maintain legal status, or that
ban the monitoring of electoral and political processes. Foreign funding
or even technical assistance to NGOs may be banned as well. Electoral
regulations may be written or interpreted in ways that are intended to
block NGOs from witnessing key processes or that limit the number
of observers so that credible groups may be kept from entering polling
stations or other facilities. Individual monitors may be hit with overly
onerous qualification requirements, including accreditation fees or a de-
86 Journal of Democracy
mand that all prospective monitors report in person to the capital city or
a handful of other places that are burdensome to reach—a ploy meant to
stop the monitoring effort from covering the whole nation.
Abuse of law enforcement is another arrow in the authoritarians’
quiver. Offices may be raided under various pretexts, with NGO leaders,
their staffs, and even relatives hauled in for questioning and put
under unwarranted surveillance. Prosecutors’ offices may be bent to the
task as well, bringing cases under repressive NGO laws, tax laws, or
even criminal libel laws. The personal and financial strains imposed
by raids, interrogations, subpoenas, or even false imprisonments can
disrupt monitoring efforts and deter citizens from joining them. False
imprisonments of election monitors rank on an autocratic roll of shame
alongside the illegitimate jailings of other human-rights advocates, independent
journalists, and peaceful oppositionists.
The intimidation of credible monitors may begin with threats to have
them fired from their jobs or to take away their children’s scholarships,
and can even escalate to physical violence. Monitors may find themselves
being refused entrance to or kicked out of polling places or other
facilities, with harassment at the hands of the regime’s minions tossed
in for good measure.
A thorough autocratic regime will accompany its street assaults with
online and other electronic attacks. Telecommunications systems—including
the Internet and social media—may be shut down at critical
times to stop citizen monitors, journalists, and electoral contestants
from making known their findings. A wise citizen-run monitoring group
will brace itself for cyberattacks and other disruptions before, during,
and after election day.
The spread of disinformation through state-run media both old and
new is essential to authoritarian attempts to control the electoral narrative.
Reports asserting the credibility of manipulated electoral processes
will be broadcast in extended profusion while critical reports go
unmentioned. Rumors and false accusations impeaching the motives,
efficacy, and veracity of genuine monitors will also fly through these
state-dominated channels.
The Rise of the Zombie Monitors
As citizen election monitoring has spread and become an accepted part
of genuine elections, autocrats have begun to create phony election-monitoring
organizations. Like state-run media and the government-organized
nongovernmental organizations (GONGOs) that authoritarian regimes
have set up to confuse and obscure the broader civil society environment,
these “zombie” election-monitoring groups spin rosy but fake narratives
about what are in fact manipulated election processes. All three—the
state media, the GONGOs, and the zombie monitors—seek to obscure the
87Patrick Merloe
findings of credible monitoring efforts with clouds of rumors and phony
charges. As is the case with government-created shadow political parties
and candidates, the bogus groups often assume names that are very similar
to those of credible monitoring organizations.
Citizen election monitors encounter these abuses in countries ranging
from Azerbaijan to Ethiopia and Egypt to Venezuela. As with similar
measures used to weaken civil society organizations more generally and
to suppress the media, the use of these tactics across numerous countries
indicates that autocratic regimes are learning from one another.
Credible international observers may be targeted in some of the
same ways as their local-citizen counterparts. Data denial is popular
among autocrats even as open access to government data is becoming
established practice. Thus, both domestic and international monitoring
groups may find themselves barred not only from entering facilities, but
also from consulting census data, voter registries, maps of electoraldistrict
boundaries and polling-place locations, or material on the workings
of election-related technologies, such as voting machines. Refusing
or failing at the timely release of polling-station vote counts and only
announcing voting totals is a favorite means to hide fraud, while technology
advances belie excuses for the denial.
Regimes may manipulate legal procedures to degrade observation
efforts. Officials can “forget”—or openly refuse—to invite intergovernmental
organizations to send international election-observation missions;
can withhold accreditations from credible organizations; or can
limit numbers so that people from such organizations are too thin on
the ground to be effective. Or officials may move so slowly on necessary
approvals that key electoral processes escape independent assessment.
Sometimes the trick can be as simple as issuing invitations and
promising accreditations—thereby seeming to cooperate with credible
monitoring—only to have mysterious “visa delays” gum up the works.
Again, like credible domestic observers, credible international observers
may be subjected to intimidation and threats of violence, perhaps as
officials conspicuously “look the other way” rather than ensure the protection
of law. International observers’ impartiality and professionalism
may be impugned by regime mouthpieces and rumor-mongers intent on
confusing world and domestic opinion while distracting credible observers
from their tasks. Other regime ploys may aim at creating conflicting
characterizations of the election in domestic and world media.
One way to sow narratives that favor the ruling party and sap credible
monitoring of its force is to invite “friendly” delegations to see the elections.
Members of sibling political parties, affiliates of allied governments,
and well-known individual supporters of the incumbents are used
to fill the ranks of observers. The idea is to stage an election-observation
mission that leans in favor of the ruling party at least enough to weaken
prospects for a critical report.
88 Journal of Democracy
Autocrats also sometimes work to capture or enfeeble otherwise
credible observer missions by influencing their personnel appointments.
“Mission-stacking” may not suffice to secure the fabrication of
wholesale favorable findings, but autocrats can still hope that it might
cause the watering-down of an unfavorable report or divert an observer
mission into extended internal debates and departures from established
election-observation principles.
Not quite rising to the level of attempting to manipulate observer
missions but akin to it is the practice of having prominent but na¦ve
foreigners—politicians including former members of the U.S. Congress
and European Parliament, election commissioners, or other well-known
figures—tour the country as the government’s guests at election time.
They witness positive (and carefully chosen) electoral developments,
then offer public comments that receive heavy play in all state-run media.
The term “zombie observers” was originally coined to describe such
reputable but deceived individuals.
A regime that can afford public-relations firms can hire them to
mount campaigns of disinformation and diversion. The methods can
be as overt as major media advertisements (some governments favor
full-color magazine or newspaper inserts printed on slick paper), or as
subtle as quiet “charm offensives.” These may feature personal visits by
leaders and friends of the regime to Western capitals, behind-the-scenes
lobbying, or the promotion of discourse about the country that does not
dwell on the elections as such but focuses on how important the country
and its stability are to Western economic or strategic interests.
Three Recent Cases
Three recent cases illustrate how election-rigging and cover-up tactics
are being used. The first is that of Azerbaijan’s October 2013 presidential
election, which returned Ilham Aliyev to the presidency for a
third five-year term with a reported 85 percent of the vote. The OSCE’s
Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) was
the only prominent international mission allowed to observe various
election processes, though it observed election day together with the
OSCE’s Parliamentary Assembly (OSCE-PA). The Parliamentary Assembly
of the Council of Europe (PACE) and a delegation from the European
Parliament (EP) also observed but only focused on the election
day. Normally, those groups would join the OSCE bodies in a joint preliminary
statement immediately following the election. This time, however,
a split developed. The OSCE bodies focused on a sharp preelection
crackdown (which undermined freedoms of expression, association, and
assembly), as well as ballot-box stuffing and counting irregularities. The
PACE and EP delegations presented positive findings.7
Aliyev’s government apparently maneuvered to stack the PACE and
89Patrick Merloe
EP delegations, and brought in sympathetic observers from friendly
sources, including other ex-Soviet republics. In order to reinforce upbeat
claims about the integrity of the balloting, the government orchestrated
the presence of foreign election commissioners. They were shown
selected polling stations and invited to comment publicly on what they
saw. Public-relations firms in the pay of the Azerbaijani government
also worked throughout the electoral period and beyond to paint a rosy
picture.
At the same time, journalists and citizen observers had been targeted
for intimidation. Azerbaijan’s Election Monitoring and Democracy
Studies Center (EMDS), a credible citizen election-observation organization
and GNDEM member, had seen its overseas funding cut off.
Then, following the election, the head of EMDS and two colleagues
were hit with trumped-up charges of tax evasion, illegal business activities,
and abuse of authority. An Azerbaijani court gave Anar Mammadli,
the head of EMDS, five and a half years in prison, while Bashir Suleymanli
and Elnur Mammadov got three and a half years each. Their real
“crime” was having had the temerity to report truthfully on elections in
their country. As of this writing in May 2015, Mammadli remains behind
bars; Mammadov’s sentence was suspended, and Suleymanli was
released approximately ten months after his false conviction. Other human-rights
defenders, journalists, bloggers, and more have landed in jail
as the Aliyev regime has continued a broad crackdown on civil society
and political opposition.
When Zimbabwe’s government held July 2013 elections for the
presidency and the bicameral Parliament—our second case—the only
international observers allowed came from the African Union and the
Southern Africa Development Community (SADC). Zimbabwean authorities
blocked U.S. and EU observation efforts, and President Robert
Mugabe warned SADC observers that Zimbabwe would pull out of the
SADC if it “decides to do stupid things.”8
(Zimbabwe had withdrawn
from the Commonwealth after being suspended for the repressive 2002
elections.)
Although the 2013 polling proceeded more peacefully than had the
bloody 2008 elections, opposition supporters were systematically disenfranchised
in huge numbers by either being denied registration or being
turned away on election day. The disenfranchisement and high incidence
of “assisted voting” (that is, accompanying the voter to help mark
the ballot) undermined the credibility of Mugabe’s claim to a landslide
61 percent and his ruling party’s lopsided majorities in the two houses
of Parliament. Yet the SADC observers made positive pronouncements.9
The head of the African Union delegation offered glowing comments to
the press10
in advance of the more nuanced official statement that came
from the AU mission as a whole.11
By contrast, the Zimbabwe Election
Support Network (ZESN)—a credible citizen election-observation
90 Journal of Democracy
coalition and GNDEM member that mobilized 7,099 monitors on election
day while keeping key processes under long-term study and assessment—had
severe criticisms of the electoral process.12
Echoing these
strictures was the 80-member observer team from Botswana, which
formed part of the SADC mission but put out its own statement contradicting
the SADC’s sunny findings.13
The earlier and more positive
statements overshadowed the ZESN and Botswanan criticisms, however—a
testament to the Mugabe regime’s grasp of how important it was
to “seize control of the narrative” and get its story out first.
The third case is that of Venezuela, where credible election monitoring
by international and citizen sources has been undermined at least
since the 2008 regional elections. Citizen election observers who accept
foreign funds face fines. The permitted number of citizen observers is
limited, and the way in which credentials are distributed between what
electoral authorities call “pro-Chavista” and “pro-opposition” groups
makes it extremely difficult for credible observers to deploy to the representative
sample of polling stations that they must observe in order
to perform sufficiently precise statistical analyses of electoral-process
quality. The incumbent regime, meanwhile, makes a point of inviting
friendly regional organizations such as the Council of Election Experts
in Latin American (CEELA) and more recently the Union of South
American Nations (UNASUR), with every expectation that they will
make positive statements about the voting and the larger electoral pro-
cess.14
Between the regime’s refusals, restrictions, and scheduling decisions,
the OAS, the EU, and the Carter Center have all found themselves
effectively blocked from observing Venezuelan elections.
When President Hugo Chávez died of cancer on 5 March 2013 without
a permanent constitutional successor, the government organized the vote
to replace him on April 14, leaving insufficient time for international organizations
to arrive and mount observation missions. Foreign witnesses,
individually and in small clusters, were present for the voting, which very
narrowly favored Chávez’s handpicked successor, interim president Nicolás
Maduro.The opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles, demanded a full
ballot audit, the implementation of which he later denounced as bogus. The
small OAS delegation that was present for election day noted the official
results and supported a full recount, while the UNASUR delegation saluted
the democratic spirit of the polls and called for respecting the result.15
Piercing the Fog
It is important to identify the tactics that autocrats use to fog the
electoral environment so that their subterfuges can be exposed and
accurate electoral assessments can be seen clearly. Citizens, national
and international journalists, international and domestic election monitors,
diplomats, and others all have roles to play in this effort. Elec-
91Patrick Merloe
toral contestants themselves must learn to defend electoral integrity by
documenting abuses and using evidence-based approaches to seeking
redress, just as electoral authorities need to assert independence and
integrity. These efforts reinforce and advance the norms and standards
for genuine elections, improving the efficacy and integrity of election
competition, administration, and monitoring. They also support those
facing autocratic hostility and pressure.
Promoting democratic norms is essential to countering authoritarian
resurgence. As democratic electoral practices gain ground, autocratic
tactics will become harder to hide. As most countries embrace wider
transparency, including access to important election-related data, efforts
to block witnesses and deny information will stand out in starker
relief. As the beachhead of accountability expands, providing redress
to those who have seen their election-related rights abridged and justice
to the violators, impunity for autocratic abuses against candidates and
voters will be broken down. As barriers to participation are leveled,
autocratic techniques of disenfranchisement will be more easily countered.
Making such advances takes time and must be approached in the
unevenness of national circumstances.
Both citizen monitors and international observers will need to continue
countering authoritarian learning with democratic learning and
innovation. Methods must be improved: Manipulation takes place
across a spectrum of electoral processes, so long-term monitoring and
systematic countertechniques must be employed. Credible international
observers should take seriously constraints on their ability to
perform tasks such as evaluating the quality of key processes that take
place months before election day, or weighing the efficacy of certain
electoral technologies. This highlights their need to improve cooperation
with credible citizen monitors. Citizen election monitors, in
turn, can benefit from cooperation with credible international observers,
who can bring attention to their findings and help keep open their
space to operate. Both international observers and citizen monitors
should also seek out others—from civil society, the media, election
authorities, and reform-minded sectors of officialdom—with whom
relationships can be built to serve political impartiality and electoral
integrity. Such multisided interaction is needed to pursue electoral and
broader democratic development, including follow-up on observer rec-
ommendations.
Networks, regional and global, should be reinforced so that peer
learning, the sharing of innovative techniques, peer-to-peer accountability,
and solidarity actions can be further developed. This is particularly
important for citizen election monitors, who operate in many countries
and often cover electoral and political processes that extend beyond and
between elections. Public communications efforts need improvement
as well. Credible citizen monitors and international observers should
92 Journal of Democracy
concentrate on getting accurate findings to the public as quickly and responsibly
as possible whether through various social media, infographics,
videos, or other communications technologies. When it comes to
countering false narratives, timing is critical.
Supporting those who work to prevent and expose authoritarian electoral
maneuvers is essential. Citizen monitors in many countries can
use direct help in the form of systematic monitoring methods and sophisticated
communications techniques, as well as aid in making their
organizations stronger. Global and regional peer networks have untold
potential to provide such assistance and to build solidarity.
Media freedoms are essential to genuine elections, democracy,
and countering rising authoritarianism. The media—broadly defined
to include bloggers, citizen journalists, and social-media users as well
as more traditional press outlets—provide a safeguard for electoral
and governmental integrity when they operate ethically. The media’s
watchdog role makes them a part of credible election monitoring and
gives them a responsibility to cover credible citizen monitors and international
observers as well as to expose zombie and phony observ-
ers.
International and domestic media should learn how to distinguish
credible citizen election monitors and international observers from
GONGOs and zombies, and should report on the broader electoral context
rather than just election day. Identifying organizations that endorse
GNDEM’s Declaration of Global Principles for citizen election monitors
and those that endorse the Declaration of Principles for International
Election Observation provides a fundamental starting point. Journalists,
scholars, and others should “monitor the monitors” and document the
dealings of phony election observers as well as the efforts of publicrelations
firms and lobbyists in major capitals to spread fog over authoritarian
electoral theft. Proper information can cut through the fog of
disinformation.
That information must be accurate and credible, and its circulation
must be timely. Only then can the true nature of an election be illuminated.
That is how public confidence is established and political volatility
is reduced—it is also how chicanery is exposed.
The world’s democratic actors, including governments, are being
challenged. Authoritarians have made a priority of controlling the narrative
concerning their elections—and more—by blocking or suppressing
truth-tellers and fogging the scene with disinformation.
Do democratic activists and democracies have the resolve to cut
through the fog by supporting real election monitoring and calling
elections by their true character? Genuine stability, like democracy,
is about much more than elections, but both depend on elections being
credible.
93Patrick Merloe
NOTES
1. See Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Article 19 and International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Article 19.
2. See UDHR, Article 21 and ICCPR, Article 25.
3. See, for example, Open Government Guide, “Elections,” www.opengovguide.com/
topics/elections.
4. The abstentions came from the three USSR voters, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Saudi
Arabia, South Africa, and Yugoslavia.
5. See the Inter-American Democratic Charter; the African Charter on Democracy, Elections
and Governance; the OSCE’s Copenhagen Document; and Article 25 of the ICCPR.
6. Patrick Merloe, “Human Rights—The Basis for Inclusiveness, Transparency,
Accountability and Public Confidence in Elections,” section 2 of “Promoting Legal
Frameworks for Democratic Elections,” NDI report, 30 September 2008, www.ndi.org/
files/2404_ww_elect_legalframeworks_093008-3.pdf.
7. Compare OSCE International Election Observation Mission, “Republic of Azerbaijan—Presidential
Election, 9 October 2013: Statement of Preliminary Findings and Conclusions,”
Baku, 10 October 2013 (www.osce.org/odihr/elections/106901?download=true)
with Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, “Presidential Election in Azerbaijan:
Joint Statement by PACE and EP Delegations,” 10 October 2013 (www.assembly.coe.int/
nw/xml/News/News-View-EN.asp?newsid=4699&lang=2&cat=31).
8. See “Mugabe Threatens Sadc Pullout. . . Labels Lindiwe Zulu ‘Street Woman,’”
News Day (Harare), 6 July 2013, www.newsday.co.zw/2013/07/06/mugabe-threatens-
sadc-pullout-labels-lindiwe-zulu-street-woman.
9. See the SADC mission’s statement at www.sadc.int/files/4313/7545/6616/FI-
NAL_Preliminary_Statement_of_the_SADC_Election_Observer_Mission_to_the_
July_31_2013_Zimbabwe_Harmonised_Elections_as_at1148_on__August_02_2013.pdf.
10. “Zimbabwe Poll ‘Free and Peaceful’ Say Obasanjo and SADC,” BBC News Africa,
2 August 2013, www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-23546050.
11. See AU observation mission’s preliminary statement on Zimbabwe’s 31 July 2013
elections, http://pa.au.int/en/sites/default/files/Final%20Copy%20Preliminary%20State-
ment%20ZImbabwe%202013.pdf.
12. See the Zimbabwe Election Support Network’s report on Zimbabwe’s 31 July
2013 elections, http://263chat.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ZESN-2013-Advance-
Harmonised-Election-Report.pdf.
13. See “Statement from Botswana SADC Parliamentary Observer Team,” 9 August
2013, www.safpi.org/news/article/2013/statement-botswana-sadc-parliamentary-observer-team.
The Botswanan government’s 5 August 2013 statement is at www.sokwanele.
com/thisiszimbabwe/statement-government-botswana-2013-election-republic-zimba-
bwe/05082013.
14. “International Observers Report Their Findings from Yesterday,” 15 April 2013,
www.democraticunderground.com/110813210.
15. See Organization of American States, “Insulza Salutes Civic Spirit of Venezuelans
and Supports Recount Proposals,” press release, 15 April 2013 and “Declaración de la
Misión Electoral de la UNASUR,” 15 April 2013.