Academic literature on the topic 'Electoral rigging'

AbstractA lack of electoral integrity in developing democracies undermines political accountability and the public good by yielding leaders who lack a governing mandate. Despite citizen activism and resources from donors to improve transparency, poor administrative functioning, corruption, and barriers to participation persistently degrade elections. This chapter presents “photo quick count” election technology and an ICT-enabled citizen adaption platform “VIP:Voice.” Photo quick count is a low-cost, ICT-capable, independently managed monitoring system of election results that provides polling station level photographic records of tally sheets to audit alongside certified results. The audit detects procedural failures by election officials and aggregation fraud (rigging that occurs in results transmission), and can deter administrative problems and corruption by announcing the audit to polling officials. First deployed in Afghanistan, iterations in Uganda and Kenya helped develop usage across national coverage and new mobile devices. This pivoted to broadening adoption and functionality using a crowdsourced platform in South Africa, VIP:Voice, that recruited citizen users through ICT channels with no pre-existing infrastructure and incorporates volunteers for photo quick count. This case furthers evidence on instruments for policy guidance on the mechanisms and cost-effective tools to bolster institutional performance and elections at scale.

This chapter discusses Turkish local elections. In the March 2014 local election in Turkey was the most controversial in the country’s recent political history owing to numerous accusations related to electoral integrity. Allegations included various types of rigging, including lost ballot papers, ballot-box tallies missing legally required stamps and signatures, high numbers of invalid votes in constituencies that were likely to have close races, power blackouts and electoral violence. what I have summarised above, this book explores the causes and consequences of damaged electoral integrity not only through the lenses of explained theoretical explanations but also with a novel and comprehensive approach. The fundamental motivation behind this investigation is the substantial increase in the attention given to the causes and consequences of damage to electoral integrity in various countries in recent years.

This chapter describes several major challenges observed during the 2016 US elections. Five issues pose growing risks to electoral legitimacy in the 2016 race: partisan polarization over electoral procedures; lack of public confidence following widespread claims of fraud, vote rigging, and the suppression of voter rights; the risks of hacking; the consequences of deregulating campaign funding; and the lack of professional standards of electoral management. It argues that without a comprehensive program of reforms addressing these problems, in a close, heated, and bitterly fought election, the 2016 contest could be a critical “tipping point” triggering lasting harm to its legitimacy.

Although electronic voting has been used for many decades, electoral organizations are still adopting it. Despite technologies that preserve the secrecy, authenticity, and privacy of data, vote-rigging and privacy breaches remain a risk in e-voting systems. Blockchain is a distributed technology that underpins bitcoin. It appears to be a fit for digital election systems, as it provides a chance to keep data secret and prohibit data manipulation. But blockchain alone is not enough to address other concerns that come up during elections such as how to make sure that the person voting has the right to do so while keeping their identity disconnected from their vote. The user can safely vote from the three-levels of authentication: OTP, QR codeshare, and blockchain. Here, the system contains a secured timestamp and the hashcode which is used to identify attacks on the distributed server. These protected services provide secure vote casting and remedies for security issues. The legal limitations are also analyzed in the blockchain distributed ledger.

This chapter describes 30 years of struggle of Ukraine to become a sovereign state, independent of Russian political influence. In the 1990s, Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of Ukraine and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were outlawed, and then Leonid Kravchuk was elected president. The first years of Ukraine’s independence were marked by a deep economic crisis. However, despite these difficulties, it was possible to take the first steps towards cooperation with the countries of Western Europe, the USA and NATO. The new millennium is a period of increasing friction between government and the opposition. Electoral rigging is starting to deepen divisions within society. The spark that led to the so-called Revolution of Dignity was President Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign an association agreement with the European Union (EU). Seeing the changes taking place in the Ukrainian people seeking to strengthen relations with the EU and the USA, Russia began to attack Ukraine militarily. At that time, it illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula and supported the separatists of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DRL, LPRL) seeking to annex these areas to the borders of the Russian state. After that time, Ukrainians began to introduce more and more economic and political reforms strengthening the state and eliminating the influence of oligarchs on the government. International efforts to increase cooperation with Western European countries have also been stepped up. Ukraine’s attempts to become completely independent from Russian influence did not appeal to the Kremlin elite. President Putin, together with his colleagues, decided to stop these actions, thereby declaring war on his neighbour.