The human condition is such that in almost every walk of life, by various means – usually trickery and force – individuals will perennially seek and try to institutionalise advantage over each other, and the most that can be hoped for is mitigation of this phenomenon. Nicholas Cheeseman and Brian Klaas (2018) ‘How to Rig an Election,’ Yale University Press) confirmed me in this position. They defined election rigging as ‘an illegitimate and undemocratic means of tilting the playing field clearly in the favour of one party or candidate at the expense of others’, and they identified six categories of manipulation. (1) gerrymandering, where the size of boundaries are arranged to give advantage to one party; (2) vote buying: the direct purchase of votes by cash or gifts; (3) repression, which takes various forms such as preventing candidates from campaigning, denying them media access, intimidating supporters of other parties to prevent them going to the polls; (4) digitally hacking to change the narrative of the debate, spread fake news or simply invent the results; (5) stuffing the ballot boxes by adding false votes, facilitating multiple voting, etc., and (6) duping the international community into legitimizing poor-quality polls.
Going through their categories I concluded that elections manipulation by those the authors called ‘counterfeit democrats’ cannot be eliminated, only minimised. Here I will deal with the vicissitudes of an unusual Guyanese expression of one of their categories but for this we need to note: ‘Because the latter three options can easily backfire, the most effective autocrats don’t leave election rigging to the last minute. … [They] begin manipulating the polls well before voting begins. If these efforts work well, vote tampering and political violence never become necessary because the result has already been determined.’
