American History Hit - Elections Explained: A History of Rigged Elections

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

Invisible ink, delayed flights and political meddling - elections are a symbol of democracy, so how can they become the opposite?Don is joined for this episode by Brian Klaas, co-author of 'How to Rig an Election' to find out. What makes a free and fair election? What techniques have authoritarians used to have themselves elected? And how widespread has this been throughout history?Brian is a political scientist, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and an associate professor in global politics at University College London.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AMERICANHISTORYYou can take part in our listener survey here.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. We've all had them, those desperate dreams. You're turning a doorknob, but the door won't open.

You scribble onto a page, but the ink just disappears. You walk through a maze that never seems to end. You are helpless against impossible odds. No impact, no ability to change the circumstance, no matter how hard you try. Throughout history and across the world, this has been the case with so many elections in so many nations. But this is no Freudian influence. This is the conscious work of authoritarian leaders pulling at the puppet strings, swinging the vote as they see fit. The dire consequences of rigged elections.

You are listening to American History Hit. Nice to have you here. I'm Don Wildman. Every week I get word from my producer, Sophie, that will be doing this or that episode on historical subjects far and wide. They're all fascinating, full of learning, best part of the job. But there are those subjects that bear direct relevance to what's in the news today, and that's always cool. This is such an episode. Back in 2018, an important book was released.

It was entitled How to Rig an Election, and it was published in the aftermath of so much that was coming out about the 2016 contest that brought Donald Trump to power, the news about foreign interference in the election, new ideas to most Americans like Russian bots, cyber security measures, and clandestine, social media-based influencing operations. All this lingo from alarmed officials in the federal government warning us that new platforms like TikTok and Facebook and others had suddenly made our election process porous and accessible to enemies and allies alike, seeking to influence our democratic process. Our phones and our computers, so much a part of our lives, have finally enabled mass accessibility to the electorate.

In those dark days, we understood that we were being played. It was a new twist on an old and sinister game, electoral fraud, traditionally played by despotic regimes, voter intimidation, vote buying, ballot manipulation, ballot box stuffing, to name but a few. To remain in power, corrupt leaders have an authoritarian toolbox available to them. And that's a term I lifted straight from the new edition of How to Reg an Election, released this year in 2024. It was written by Brian Class and Nick Cheesman, and one half of that team joins me now, Brian Kless, welcome to American History Hit. Thanks for having me.

Before we talk about the negative, let's define the positive in this conversation. In these cynical times, I need to say the words, free and fair election. It feels good. What does that mean and why is it an important place to start? Yeah, it's an important place to start because this is the aspiration of billions of people around the world to choose their leaders without manipulation, right? And so a free and fair election refers to the idea that you are free to choose who you would like to elect. So you don't have your choices given to you. A lot of elections that involve dictators only have one name on the ballot, for example.

And that it's fair that there's actually competition. And this is where the core idea of democracy, when you really think about it, it's competition. It's that there are people who are competing for votes, competing for ideas and policies and so on. And if you have a rigged election, you have undercut the core pillar of democracy because you no longer have the ability to choose your own leaders. And that's why this sort of idea of free and fair elections is so central to what democracy is all about. Yeah. But fact is, many elections are not free and fair. It just exists to give the impression of democracy.

That is another fact of life. And this has been going on for a long time, as I mentioned in the opening. When did this begin authoritarian leaders agreeing to hold elections, but in name only? sort of, right? Yeah, I mean, there are examples of rigged elections throughout history. There's even references to them in sort of Greek mythology and so on. So humans have had an impulse to try to manipulate, you know, any sort of electoral process or quasi-electoral process for a very long time.

What I would say is that you have this sort of period after World War II in which there's a rise of authoritarian regimes around the world that hold elections simply to validate their powers. These are called one-party elections. So this is where the dictator, you know, the classic example Americans will know is like Saddam Hussein, where you've got one name on the ballot, he wins 99.9% of the vote, and they call it an election. And of course, it's not actually an election. It's something that we in the book refer to as an election-style event because we don't want to refer to it as an election,

because that comes with all sorts of, you know, good and positive connotations. Now, what happened over time is that in the 1990s, a lot of the world started to hold multi-party elections. And this is a byproduct of the fact that the U.S. beats the Soviet Union and ends the Cold War. And so the U.S. is sort of the only game in town. They're this big superpower. And they can start to sort of, you know, say to other countries, like, look, you know, if you want foreign aid from us or if you want to be respected and legitimate in the international

community, you've got to hold a real election. So there's this surge of genuinely competitive elections starting. after 1991 and a lot of the world. I'm simplifying the story somewhat, but this is sort of one of the big trends. And what you see over the span of the next 10 to 15 years is that the politicians learn how to rig them more effectively. So in the early stage, they don't even have competition. Then they start having competition and then they get better at rigging them. And this is sort of why we argue that there's this central paradox to modern politics, which is that there are more elections than there have ever been before in the history of

humanity. I mean, this is the year of elections in 2024. And yet the world is consistently getting less democratic. And that's obviously a bizarre paradox because a lot of people think that elections equals democracy. And that's not true if a lot of the elections are rigged. So that's the sort of broad picture is that there's a lot of elections and most of them are of pretty poor quality around the world. It's worth reflecting. I mean, a person of my age, born in 1961, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War was over, boy, there was a wonderful feeling of hope, you know, because it was that feeling like finally we proved that that whole authoritarian thing doesn't work. It failed. The biggest example of it failed right there. And there was a good couple of years there where you thought, this is going to be a great next half of my life if you were my age at the time. And you were thinking this is all smooth sailing. Quite the opposite happened for reasons that you mentioned already, that there were. were automatically people back on their heels figuring how am I going to hold on to this power that I had or still want and all of this would happen. That leads to a lot of examples of what we're

going to talk about. But I want to point out that as I mentioned before, this is a re-released book and you have an update to this new edition that is a chilling thing to read. I have to say, may I take a moment to read something that you wrote? Of course, please do, yeah. It's right off from the beginning. It has been more than five years since how to rig an election was first published, and we regret to inform you that things have got worse. The dictators have innovated. The watchdogs have struggled to keep pace, and major democracies from Brazil to the United States have faced major crises as elections have been challenged by disinformation, polarization, and dwindling citizen confidence in political institutions. You are hearing this every day in the news.

To root this in the election process is really useful, and that's what this book does. It's very distressing, but you're basically unpacking something we've got to understand really starts with voting. Yeah, I mean, it's the core of Democratic choice. And I think what I really worry about is that, you know, it's useful, I think, that you put this in the historic context of the sort of optimism after the Cold War, because what a lot of people experienced, I think, in the sort of generations, whether it was the generation that went through World War II or the generation that went through the Cold War, is they had a very clear. clear choice, right? It's democracy or it's, you know, fascism and Nazism and so on, or it's democracy

and it's communism, right, dictatorial communism. And the 1990s were a period where there wasn't an obvious rival, right? Now, China has emerged and so on. But because of that, I think there's a lot of people who just sort of look at the problems of democracy and think, oh, the grass is probably greener. And so what you have is this sort of start of the flirtation with the idea that maybe democracy isn't so great. And there's a lot of data that support that there's this change where people who lived through World War II or lived through the Cold War are way less likely to say that democracy isn't all it's cracked up to be. But younger generations are more willing to sort of flirt with alternatives because they didn't, you know, experience the sort of rival that was so clearly

worse. And, you know, I think this is something where we just are not keeping pace with all these changes to how we get information about the world. There's a lot of politicians. who are taking advantage of this. And as a result, you know, there's a lot of people, even in the most rich democracies in the world, including the United States, that just don't have faith in the electoral process. We can talk about that a little bit in terms of whether it's warranted and so on. But regardless of the detail of what's true and what's false, it is a very bad sign that a large number of people in democracies that are the most important ones don't believe the elections are legitimate. That is a very bad sign. And we're going to have to grapple with that, I think,

for a generation and figure out how to ensure that we restore trust in these processes. It's also a chicken and egg situation, you know, how much that cynicism has been set in motion by the very practices we're about to talk about, which is really quite sophisticated and everything. But I do want to underscore what you just said. This is not just a United States, Eastern Europe thing. You know, that's how much we're so keyed into that because of our culture. But this is a worldwide phenomenon. You know, you spend a lot of time talking. talking about Asia and Indonesia and places like that that Americans don't generally think about in their daily life, perhaps, but it really is everywhere and it's growing. So let's talk about the title, what the titles suggest. How do rigors undermine the electoral process?

There's quite a long checklist. We're going to do just a few of them and talk about, you know, how these things started and where they impact. Vote buying. Interesting. I never thought of that as being such a large factor in this, but indeed it is. Yeah, so, I mean, there's sort of the smart strategies and the stupid strategies, and they've evolved over time. And one of the early and crude strategies is vote buying. And the reason it's, so to put it into context of what it actually means, it's literally paying people to vote for you. And there's a lot of places in the world where this still exists. I mean, there are lots of political machines where they raise money and they don't use it for, you know, TV ads like you have in the United States. They use it to literally pay voters.

And it's, you know, depending on the economy and how poor the country is, It might just be a couple of dollars that they give you in exchange for your vote. Sometimes it's a little bit less overt where, you know, I've been in places where they'll hand out T-shirts and other things. And, you know, you might imagine the United States, this wouldn't sway you. But if you only have four shirts, well, you know, all of a sudden a T-shirt is worth something. And so in places that have severe poverty, vote buying can be very effective because it's not very expensive and it produces results. One of the problems for people who do vote buying is they can't guarantee that you're at. actually going to vote for them. Because if it's a secret ballot, how do they know that you don't

just take the money and vote for the opponent? So one of the things that's really amazing is the way they engineer sophisticated methods to ensure that this happens. So one of the craziest ones, I think, is an election in sub-Saharan Africa, I believe it's in Senegal, where in this system, every single political party has its own ballot. So what you do to vote is you don't check a box, you just leave the ballot of the political party that you intend to vote for in the envelope and you take all the other ballots with you, right? And what they did was they held a concert with one of the main pop stars where the ticket to get in was all the other ballots.

So if you left their ballots in the envelope and you took all of the opponent's ballots, then you could prove that you had voted for the right party, quote unquote, the right party, and then you'd get access to see the pop star. It's a crude system in vote buying, but sometimes they're clever about how they ensure that you actually cast the quote-unquote right ballot. 2012 to 16, more than two-thirds of elections in Africa and almost half of the elections in Asia and in post-Soviet Europe featured vote buying. It was a very, very widespread practice. Yeah, it's extremely widespread. It happens all over the world, and it still happens today.

The dark side of this also is the threat of violence. More than a third of elections in Africa, Asia saw state violence targeting opposition parties and their support. quarters. Once you've used this in the past, you can then threaten to use it in the future. I mean, it becomes a very flexible tool, isn't it? Yeah. So, I mean, violence is a feature of elections all over the world. And, you know, we see this a lot. Mexico, for example, is a place where there's a lot of violence of politicians right now. I mean, they're just getting gunned down in the street and so on. But it's used strategically. And the clever people, and I say this not with admiration, but just it's very sophisticated and smart how they're doing this. My co-author, Nick Cheesman, coined this term

called Shaking the Matchbox, and it makes sense when you understand the story of where it came from. So in Zimbabwe, there was an election where because all the opposition or many of the opposition voters lived in the same neighborhoods, in one of the elections, they used violence. They burned down a ton of the houses in the opposition areas. So they use arson. And it was obviously a very violent, heavy-handed tactic. But the downside of this is that you get a news story about this in the New York Times, right? There's sort of, there's a cost to doing it because people notice that you're rigging the election

by burning down the homes of the opposition voters. So what they did the next time around was rather than burning down the houses again, they just had people from the regime walk through the neighborhoods shaking a matchbox. And it was a very clear threat. It was that if we come back, it's not just going to be shaking the matchbox, we will burn down your houses so you better not vote. And of course, nobody's going to write the story in the New York Times that says, you know, man walks through neighborhood carrying matchbox.

So it's the way that you get the threat of, cross without actually having to provoke the sort of backlash in international attention. And this underscores this broader point we make in the book that there's this constant sort of cat and mouse game where people are trying to catch people who rig elections. And then the people who rig them are trying to innovate. They're trying to come up with smarter strategies so they can sort of hit that sweet spot of getting away with it and also winning. And a lot of the world's elections are constantly defined by people who are coming up with

new and clever ploys to try to steal elections. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. You make the point about a 1998 election that was going on in St. Petersburg on the local level. Tell me that story. It's Oleg Sergiev. Yeah, this story is amazing. It actually has an update since the book came out, which is even more sinister. So Oleg Sergev is running for this local official position in St. Petersburg. and the powers that be don't want them to win. Now, in this race, they don't have any party affiliation.

They don't have any photographs. They just have the names. So what they do is they recruit two other people who are also called Oleg Sergeyev, and they get them to run for office. And so the voters go into the booth to cast their ballot, and they see a ballot that has three Oleg Sergeevs in it. Wow. Right?

And they say, well, which one's the right one? So they just pick one of them. I actually, when I teach this in my class, what I do is I say, you know, I'm a dog lover and I like dogs more than cats. So I have them say, what kind of pet do you like more? And there's four options. Dog, cat, cat, cat, right? And what I do is I say, oh, well, I split the cat vote three ways. So, of course, dogs win, right?

Yeah. You all voted for cat A or cat B or cat C. And it's exactly the same thing with Oleg Sergei. So of course he loses because they don't know how to vote for him. Now, to try to combat this, and this tells you how smart these people are, and how sinister they are. They changed the ballot process where they put photographs on. Now, in a more recent election in Russia, they didn't just recruit people who had the same names. They convinced them to change their name legally after they found people who looked like the

opposition leader. Wow. And they made them look the same. So they literally had them, you know, trim their beard the same way, shave their head. So they looked like this bald guy with a beard and then legally changed their name so that when they went to cast their ballots, it's not just that you have three people with the same name. They all look identical. I mean, it's just like, it's, it's comical on the one hand, but on the other hand, it's also, you know, very serious because they're undercutting the legitimacy of the elections. And of course, all the voters know what's going on, right? This is the other thing that undermines faith in the process. Of course, nobody has faith in Russian elections anyway. But, but it's,

you go into the cast your ballot. You know exactly what they're doing when they have these doubles and all this type of stuff. So it's a pretty crazy links that people will go to to rig elections. Well, I think it's, you know, so much a part of our modern times, politically speaking, or electorally speaking, is about end justifying means. If you are somebody who sees this as a system that serves you, you want this result, then you're allowed in your own mind to do what you need to do. There are, of course, laws and you might be aware of them or not, but, you know, the government can only do so much when the personality is so, the values are tilted in one direction. And so I think that these generations we're in have begun to see the electoral process as something to rig. You know, like that's like that's the point, it seems. Yeah. And I think, you know, the stakes, when the stakes are high, the rigging becomes

more attractive to. It's one of the things that is is really important for people to understand outside of the sort of context of democracies is that a lot of these people who lose power in a dictatorship, they get killed, right? Or they go to jail or they're forever exiled. It's not like they go on a book tour and become sort of this emissary for diplomacy and all this stuff. The stakes are really high here. And so this is why they're rigging elections all the time, because losing power is very dangerous in most of the world. They get persecuted and prosecuted by their enemies and so on.

So it's one of these aspects where the carrot and the stick is operating. The carrot is the corruption, where you get a lot of money if you win. And the stick is that you might die. And I think if I faced, you know, those incentives, you can understand why someone would try to think a lot about how to ensure that they didn't end up getting killed after they lost an election. Of course, yeah. I mean, we are so lucky to be inside our bubble here, which things are relatively safe, relatively ordered. Of course, we'll get to this at a moment that things have changed a lot. But this, your book, takes us to corners of the world. We don't think about that much.

The last of this before we get to the United States is a story about Madagascar, the 2006 election there, fascinating story of excluding opposition candidates. Yeah, so this is, I've spent a lot of time in Madagascar. It's one of the most interesting islands and places in the world. And I got to know the guy who did this, the former president who rigged this election and asked him about it. His name is Mark Ravalo Manana. And basically he sort of becomes this kingpin with a dairy empire. He becomes very rich selling yogurt and becomes the president and decides that he wants to rig the 2006 election. And his main rival has been exiled. This happens a lot in these countries where they've for to force their opponent to live abroad. Now, he changes the law so that if you want to run for office, you have to come back to Madagascar and do it in person. You can't file electronically. You can't fax your application and you've got to sign the paperwork in person. So his main opponent starts to get on airplanes to come back. These are like commercial flights. They're like Air France flights back to Madagascar from Paris where he's in exile.

And every time the airplane enters Malagasy airspace in Madagascar, the president picks up the phone and calls the air authority and says close the airspace. No planes can now land. So like five or six times this presidential candidate gets turned away midair. And then eventually, you know, like the deadline for filing to run for office ends and he doesn't make it. And so the election unfolds without him on the ballot. And of course, you know, the incumbent wins in a landslide. And the problem with this, and this is one of the issues that I think is really hard to grapple. with is that there was nothing illegal about what he did. It was totally illegitimate, right? But according to the law, the guy didn't file his paperwork in person, so he couldn't be a candidate, right? And the judges

verified this and they said, yes, okay, all the eyes were dotted, all the T's were crossed. And so it's the problem where, like, the international community then gave the thumbs up to this election, because the law was followed. And so this is where a lot of the rigging is happening in ways that are not illegal explicitly, but they're totally, totally illegitimate. And it's one of the problems we have in sort of criticizing or condemning these rigged elections is that most of the time all we can really say was that was against the law. And you can very clearly see that this was illegitimate but not illegal. Mostly we hear about voter suppression tactics. But one of the big ones, the headline really, is the gerrymandering, which happened. Again, this is like the invisible type of rigging because it

happened over a generation, really. All across the South, tactics were enacted. I mean, gerrymandery is not new. This is a 19th century phenomenon. that both sides have employed, of course. But in recent times, gigantic amounts of manipulation has been happening, very questionably. Update us as to where we're at with that right now. Yeah, so this is, given that we're on a history podcast, I'll just give you a brief history of this, which I think is interesting because the term gerrymandering comes from Elbridge Gary. I'm told it reliably by historians that it's pronounced Gary, but that the term that his name has now been associated with is, of course, Jerry Mandarin.

So we don't say gerrymandering, even though it's Elbridge Gary. Now, the point is that there was this map that was drawn, and it was this incredibly convoluted district map that looked, according to one political cartoonist of the time, as a salamander. And so the political cartoonist drew it as though it were a salamander, these districts. And this is where the name comes from. It's a gerrymander that becomes then a gerrymander. So that's where gerrymandering comes from. It's Elbridge, Gary, and the salamander from this famous political cartoon. tune. Now, the short version of what it is, and I think this is a nice way of thinking about it,

is you're allowing politicians to pick their voters rather than having voters pick their politicians, right? So you're allowing the politicians to draw the maps, and then they get to decide which voters are in their district. And of course, this creates terrible incentives. I mean, it's the electoral foxes guarding the henhouse, as it were. Now, in recent years, you have a lot of gerrymandering. And so both parties do it in the United States. And, currently there's more gerrymandering in Republican states, but it's, you know, it's been done by both parties. And what this means is that you've undercut one of the core ideas of democracy, which is competition. So I crunch the numbers in the 2016 elections. And for the U.S. House of Representatives

races, which is, you know, there's 435 seats, the average margin of victory in those 435 elections was 37.1%. So what that means is that the average politician's, you know, there's a average politician's in the House was elected in a 70-30 landslide. Now, that's terrible, right? Because it means that it's a foregone conclusion. We know who's going to win the election. And the overwhelming majority of seats are not competitive. And part of the reason for that is because of gerrymandering, but the districts have been drawn to be safe so that you never lose the election. And so this is one of the areas of election. And we do call this election rigging. I mean, I think it is election rigging in the United States. It's one of the areas where the U.S. is the most sophisticated

in the world. And it's also one of the areas where it's done completely openly and completely legally. And, you know, when you explain this to other people in most democracies in the rest of the world, I mean, I live in the United Kingdom. And they say, wait a minute, you let the politicians draw the districts? Why do you do that? And there's no justification. I mean, we have clear evidence that this is a terrible practice. It should be a bipartisan reform. And it's impossible to get people to vote for it because they'd be voting themselves out of their seats. But it is one of the most insidious features of American elections, and it's really bad for democracy. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. And you're speaking to us from the

UK. It is as much a problem there, isn't it? Gerrymandering has been happening there as well. Well, it's less of a problem in the UK. It has a history where it used to be very bad with things called rotten burrows, where they would carve out these little districts, and you might have, you know, a very small number of constituents just to keep one person in charge. You mentioned Rottenborough. What does that mean, Brian? Yeah. So a Rottenborough was something where you had this sort of very small electorate specifically carved out to make basically a rich person in the UK get elected in a safe seat. And so it was an opportunity for people who are well-connected, often aristocrats, to become

members of parliament through totally uncompetitive elections where they carved out basically who they wanted to vote for them. But most democracies, including the UK, have sort of independent districting commissions now. And some states have done this in the U.S., right? There's a few states that have either judges, draw maps, or they have independent citizen commissions and so on. And so this is one of those things that just drives me crazy because there's such obvious remedies. Right. There's a lot of problems in the world that are hard. This is not one of the hard problems to solve. This is one that has a really obvious remedy. Just make it so the people who have a self-interest in the districting process are nowhere near it. And, you know, Democrats and Republicans

don't agree on much. We should agree on this. And it's something where, you know, I just, I feel very frustrated about it because it would pay huge dividends because we talked briefly about polarization when you were talking about some of the things that are going wrong in American democracy now. Part of that is because the districts are not competitive and the politicians, therefore have every incentive to polarize us because they want to win by galvanizing their base, right? They don't want to win over the other side in a 52-48 or 51-49 race. They just want to fire up their base. So the structural aspects of how elections are run plays into the polarization that creates toxic politics. And that's why gerrymandering is one of the things that I would put

top of the list for what we need to fix about U.S. elections. Agreed. It also sets the table for more corruption. I mean, if, you're not a lot of You're doing this legally, and let's just be clear, when a party wins the state legislature, that's when they have the right to start redistricting. It's part of the law. That's how it's always done. You're suggesting a kind of revolution in that regard where nationwide we reexamine that process, which has been accepted since the beginning of the country. Do you think there's any practical chance that that will happen? I think there is. It will require citizens from both parties banding together. And I think they can. I think this is one of those rare issues where actually every,

should agree we want competitive elections. It's just better for Democrats and better for Republicans. The people it's worse for is the existing politicians. It's better for everybody else, right? What I think is also an interesting idea is that I think when you draw districts, there's no perfect district, right? There's no reason why this district should be there and this district should be there. I mean, it's arbitrary no matter what. There's a subjective aspect to it. I think we should maximize competition. I mean, I think if you're drawing districts, you have this bizarre thing that happens in American elections where sometimes you have these swing states where they're genuinely like 50-50 states and then they have like 10 congressional seats and one of them is competitive

because the district has been drawn to be nine uncompetitive races and then one competitive race even though there's half the state is Republican and half the state's Democrat. So I think that when we think about how to do redistricting better, first off we got to get the politicians out of it. And secondly, we should try to maximize competition. I mean, it's a divided country. country, right? The country is really split evenly. So our elections should be as close as possible. And that will maximize the incentives for politicians to behave responsibly and to try to win over the other side a bit more. And that will, you know, sort of detoxify some of our politics. Right. I think that time is coming. It's such an onerous idea, everything you're talking about as far as

Jeremy is concerned that it's just a matter of time before people get so tired of this polarized society we live in. Really, that drives so much in America, really. People just get sick. tired of it. And we have enough rights baked into our constitution that we can actually speak out about things. I think eventually they're speaking about this because I think it lays, it is the fertile ground in which so much of what we live in now grows from. I want to talk about one last example just because it involves invisible ink, which I just from my childhood. I love the idea. It's the Ukrainian election of 2004 presidential election. Tell me how disappearing ink played a factor. This is one of my favorites, a wild story of how brazen they were.

But basically what happened was there was an area in Ukraine where a lot of the opposition voters lived. And the opposition voters go to cast their ballots and they, you know, check the box as you do. They pick up the pens. They check the box. Everything is normal. What they don't realize is that the pens they have been given had disappearing ink in them. And they disappeared after 10 or 15 minutes. But of course, by this point, the voters left.

They can't see the ballot. it's in the ballot box, et cetera. So when they go to count the boats, they're all completely blank, all of them, right? And so the problem is you can't just like guess what they were. And of course, this means that this opposition area had zero votes. And so everyone knew what happened, but there was no real remedy.

I mean, you imagine this happening in the United States. It would be like, you know, you have the entirety of Alabama or the entirety of California just has blank ballots. I mean, what do you do, right? With they've given Disappearing Inc. And I think what this highlights is that if you can think of a bizarre but sort of clever way of manipulating elections, it's probably been done because, you know, politicians around the world are motivated by power. And elections are one of the ways that they lose power.

And so they manipulate them. And it's incumbent on citizens, especially in democracies, to demand that we have the best quality elections because it's such a central feature. of what it means to live in a democratic state. Yeah, it's a really fun read this book. And I want to point out of what I mentioned at the top, the update that you put in this new edition. And I want to circle back to that because it describes a democratic world in severe decline. I mean, you don't pull punches here. According to your criteria, it has been a straight 17-year downward trend, which is, you know, a 30,000 foot way to say that democracy is dying and fast. But there are hopeful signs, and this prompted, I guess, this prompted, I guess, the 14 points that you make about how to

combat this trend. I mean, how do we stop this from happening? I know it's a deep dive for that, but if you can mention a few ideas, that'd be helpful. Yeah, I mean, I am a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist on this. The trends are bad, but I think that, you know, I've traveled around the world, and I think people want to have a say over how their lives are governed. There's this thirst for democracy and genuine democracy, right? So if we can harness that, we can solve these problems. There's ways to reform elections and make them more transparent, more accountable, et cetera. One of the ways in which we could do this, for example, it's a simple idea with technology,

is, and it's being used in some places, is that in the developing world, they often have, like, plastic tubs as ballot boxes, and they print out zip ties that have barcodes on them. And what they do is they check to make sure that the barcode for the zip tie is the same barcode at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day, so no one has opened it up. It costs almost no money, but it ensures that they haven't opened it up and tampered with the ballot box. So you can see how little tweaks can make these things more secure. You also have ways in which apps can be used. For example, in a lot of the developing world, the way that the elections are rigged is by them just manipulating the vote count. And one of the things you can do is at the precinct level, they count all the votes at the end.

You know, there's a school and they count the votes and all this stuff, same way we do in the United States. And then they often will write on the blackboard in the school what the tally was in that location. Ordinary people can take pictures of that, right? They couldn't do that 10 years ago and send it to the electoral commission. So that if there's a difference between the number that was counted and the number that's reported, all of a sudden citizens are empowered to actually showcase that there's a number. a discrepancy. But the bigger picture, and I think this is one where the United States has an outsized role in this, is we have to sort of demand that elections are good quality. And it starts

first off by setting an example in the United States, and by and large, American elections are well run. I mean, they're well run aside from gerrymandering, aside from voter suppression, and aside from the role of money in politics. But the tabulation, the counting of elections in the United States is pretty good. And we have to sort of insist that that's the gold standard internationally. And there's ways we can certify elections more effectively. We can be sticklers for saying, you know, we're not going to recognize governments if they've clearly had a sham election, using that power of being the world's superpower to try to influence the ways in which dictators and despots stop manipulating elections. And I am genuinely hopeful over the long run.

I think that there is a lot of opportunity for people to demand that these things are done fairly, cleanly, you know, freely and so on. And I hope that the 21st century is sort of, it starts with a bit of a stumble and that the democracy declining is sort of the beginning of the story. But I think there's ways to write a much more hopeful ending. It really matters a lot. On our side, we can educate ourselves, strengthen our bonds to democratic institutions, volunteer to be a voting officer or a person sitting in that gymnasium and so forth. And for goodness sakes, everybody. needs to vote. That is one of the things that has come out of these past controversial elections,

is that people have really come out to vote, which is a promising sign to me. Brian Class is the co-author of How to Rig an Election, newly re-released, as I say, and available through your preferred means. Brian writes for the Atlantic Magazine, as well as works as an associate professor at University College London. It has been an honor. Thank you so much, Brian. We'll see you again some time. Thank you. Thanks for having me on the show. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, Every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries.

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