Content Credentialed Media in Election Observation Missions – First Lessons Learned

Editor’s Note:

The analysis presented in this article is based on the author’s experience supporting The Carter Center’s election mission in Venezuela. The views and observations expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official stance of The Carter Center.

Context

The Digital Threats Initiative at The Carter Center investigates the impact of new technologies on electoral processes and the practice of election observation. In the context of its work on generative AI, in 2024, the initiative piloted the use of digitally credentialed media in the Carter Center's election observation missions. The following is an attempt to share the learnings with fellow practitioners and make recommendations for others who wish to likewise experiment with the technology.

Digital Provenance

AI-generated "deepfakes" are increasingly used for misinformation in political campaigns; there are different approaches in trying to distinguish them from authentic media and mitigate their impact on elections. One is detection, using tools that analyze properties of audiovisual media to identify anomalies resulting from the AI generation process. Another is digital provenance, a technique that adds temper-evident, digitally signed metadata to images when they are created. These "content credentials" can later be read to check the media origins.

Such credentials can be used to identify AI-generated media. But content credentials can also be embedded into images taken by physical cameras and smartphone apps, adding information asserting that they were captured using this specific recording device, from light hitting a camera sensor pointed at an event in real life, at a specific place and time, and have not been altered since. They can thus provide evidence that a photo or video represents an authentic record of real-world events.

Being able to demonstrate media authenticity this way should be valuable for organizations deploying Election Observation Missions (EOMs) as they document election-related events as they unfold on the ground, often in scenarios of low trust and high polarization. Being able to prove that documenting media were truly recorded by the organization, where and when they say they were, and have not been altered since, should add credibility to monitoring work.

Origins and key actors

Digital provenance pre-dates Generative AI. It has been used both by human rights organizations and in the corporate sector. Human rights activists have used credentialed media when documenting rights violations on their smartphones. Corporations have deployed the technology to combat piracy of digital media. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), currently the most visible actor in the digital provenance space, is a corporate initiative originally founded with that objective. In the Carter Center's pilot, media capture tools that have emerged from both these non-profit and the corporate spaces were used.

For an image example see: https://www.southernforge.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/VenCredRallyUnscaled.jpg

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Lessons learned from the pilot project

There are a number of observations and lessons learned from the Center’s experience using the tools that are shared here.

Evaluation of available tools before the mission

The digital provenance field is growing quickly and there are different tools that can generate media with embedded credentials, including

• smartphone camera apps and digital cameras that generate credentialed media at capture

• software that can add credentials ex-post to conventionally captured media

For the field test, the Center discarded the use of dedicated digital cameras because of their high cost, nor did it further explore tools designed to add credentials to media ex-post, for reasons detailed below.

Two smartphone apps were eventually selected for field testing:

• one commercial app originating from the corporate ecosystem around the C2PA, and

• one free open-source app originating from the human rights sector.

The apps were used side-by-side to allow for comparative evaluation.

App deployment and staff training in the field

The Center developed a specific training session for its field staff and observers demonstrating how to use both apps and explaining the rationale behind the pilot program. Both apps were pre-installed on work phones provided by the Center.

A lesson learned was that the barrier to adoption and usage of the apps was still notable. Staff will often opt to use their phones' native camera function over starting a different camera app to capture credentialed media, especially in time critical situations.

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Evaluation of tools in the field in the run-up to and during eDay

Several aspects relevant to performance and utility emerged during testing.

App start-up time from "sleep"

When an observer encounters a situation needing media capture, they will usually pull their phone out of their pocket and activate it. Even if the app had been open last, it takes time until it "wakes up" and is ready to capture. Some apps are ready faster than others, and if the app takes too long, the moment that the observer wanted to capture may have passed. Rather than losing important photos, observers may choose to revert to their phones' native cameras, foregoing credentialling altogether. Startup time is critical.

Does the app require an internet connection to work?

Some apps require a working internet connection to function properly. But such connectivity is not always available in the field. Apps that work reliably offline are preferable for the EOM usecase.

Does the app limit video recording length?

Some apps limit the length of videos captured. Yet some situations emerging during observation may take longer than the limit permits, leading to truncated records of events. Apps that don't impose such restrictions are preferable.

Does the app provide cloud storage for media?

Some apps provide for cloud storage space to upload and store all images taken by the user. This assures that the media, with their credentials intact, is always safely backed-up and quickly available to the core team in the capital. Apps that only store media locally on the phone require field staff to manually share them with mission HQ, which can cause delays as well as damage the credentials when done incorrectly (see "the fragility challenge" below). Therefore, apps that provide cloud storage are preferable.

It is recommended to make sure that the cloud provided is private, either because the app permits users to configure their own cloud storage provider, or because the storage is in a private cloud provided by the app maker that only the EOM has access to. Some apps offer public cloud storage, where images are shared with the community of other app users, which is unsuitable for EOM usage.

Which provenance formats does the app support for the credentials?

The C2PA has defined a standard that has been gathering a lot of adherence and media attention. Digital Provenance is often simply implied to mean "C2PA credentialed". However, other standards exist. The open-source app tested by the Carter Center, for example, was able to add credentials in two different formats:

1. its own, native format (consisting of the original image file and auxiliary proof files, all packaged into a ZIP archive) and

2. C2PA-compliant provenance embedded in the image itself

The commercial app focused on producing C2PA compliant credentialed images only.

Different standards have technical advantages and disadvantages. However, choosing the standard will also depend on where and how the EOM intends to publish the credentialed materials. A more popularly adopted standard like C2PA's may be superior for EOMs simply because it offers more verification and display options. For a more detailed discussion see "The display challenge" below.

Does the app allow for organization-specific signatures?

None of the capture apps evaluated by the Carter Center allowed for import and usage of the organization’s own digital certificate for signing the images. All apps use signatures issued by the maker of the app. Even the dedicated digital cameras excluded because of their cost use certificates issued by the camera manufacturer.

While using an organization's own institutional certificate does add technical complexity, it also strengthens the credibility of the credentials. Seeing that an image is institutionally signed by The Carter Center is likely to generate more trust than seeing that it was signed by an app maker. The latter only indicates that a specific app was used to take the image, but not that Carter Center observers operated the app. It would be desirable for app makers to support import of institutional signature certificates.

At the time of the pilot, the only option available for signing images with the Carter Center's own institutional certificate was using the C2PA's command line tools to sign conventionally captured images ex-post. An option to sign its images -at capture time- with the Center’s own certificate would have been preferable, but no app evaluated supported this at the time.

Adding credentials at capture vs ex-post

In its pilot, the Carter Center focused on apps that embed credentials at the same moment the image is taken. Some leverage different security frameworks provided by the phone's hardware and operating system to prevent certain types of deception (e.g. spoofing GPS locations) and may also push information identifying the recording device and the image to a trust broker service, e.g. on a blockchain, immutably recording the time of creation of that exact image. Such techniques make it more likely that the signed metadata is authentically describing the image or video they accompany.

There are also tools that can add credentials at a later stage to images previously taken in conventional ways. However, adding credentials ex-post lacks the assurances that at-capture credentialing can provide, as both the image itself and its unsigned metadata could have been modified between capture and signature. The value of images signed ex-post for asserting authenticity of the image itself, and thus serve as evidence is limited.

Images signed ex-post are suited to proving that the image was "last touched" by the signatory and has not been modified since. However, in a context of high polarization, it is of limited value. If an actor distrusts the Carter Center as a credible source, they will also distrust its credentialed media if they are signed ex-post. If an actor does trust the Carter Center, they don't need the credentials to trust the images. Therefore, the Carter Center decided to not further explore ex-post signing for the time being.

The fragility challenge

Sending C2PA credentialed media through instant messengers like WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal will permanently strip the credentials. On iPhones, just saving them to the phone's regular camera roll will also destroy the credentials. Importing them into media managers like Windows Photos will also break them. Basically, any tool or software that modifies the image, including reencoding for size, will destroy the credentials.

Uploading credentialed media to cloud storage will usually preserve the credentials, as will sharing them as email attachments.

A lesson learned is that extreme caution must be taken in "handling" C2PA credentialed images -- they are very easily damaged. Here again, training staff and observers is paramount.

The display challenge

Provenance credentials are invisibly embedded in photos and videos. The platforms on which audiovisual media are consumed must extract them and display the information to media consumers. For most EOMs, the media captured during a mission are likely to be used

• on social media

• on their organization's website as part of the publication of their reports

• as embedded images in PDF files

Each of these channels currently presents non-trivial challenges.

Social media

Unfortunately, most social media platforms in 2024 do not display provenance credentials at all. Not only that; most popular platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, YouTube) strip metadata when media are uploaded and with that, credentials are also stripped. At the time of writing, only LinkedIn and TikTok conserved metadata during upload, and extracted and displayed C2PA credentials in a limited manner.

As adoption of C2PA by industry advances, it is likely that social media platforms will increasingly preserve and display C2PA credentials; several initiatives to that end have been announced. Yet for now, EOMs are limited in their options to publish their credentialed materials on social media.

Institutional Websites

To work around limitations of social media, EOMs can host the material on their institutional website, where media can be uploaded with the credentials intact. EOMs need to add extra code (e.g. a JavaScript library) to the pages where the images would be displayed, which when encountering C2PA credentials in an image, adds a visual logo overlay to the image. Upon hovering over that logo, the credentials are displayed to the website reader in a sidebar.

Adding code requires some knowledge of programming and will usually need to be handled by IT staff managing the institutional website.

PDF embedding

The C2PA is working on embedding credentialed images into PDF files and displaying the credentials when displaying them in readers such as Adobe Acrobat Reader. Since EOM reports are often published in PDF format, embedding credentialed images this way could be useful.

However, these implementation efforts appear to be at an early stage and are not yet available in practice. PDFs should provide an interesting publishing avenue once the feature becomes available.

Provenance checker sites

The possibility of reaching consumers with credentialed EOM media through peer-to-peer distribution channels other than social media or instant messengers with credentials preserved was also considered. Savvy media consumers with knowledge of the provenance concept may check for the presence of credentials by uploading them to a checker site, such as Microsoft's https://contentintegrity.microsoft.com/check, Adobe's https://contentcredentials.org/verify or Proofmode's https://proofcheck.gpfs.link/.

When material was tested on these sites, the results were mixed. Not all sites displayed all information (e.g. location, capture date) from all media correctly. Microsoft's and Adobe's sites also displayed warnings regarding the "unknown" origin of the credentials generated by the open-source app because its certificate was not whitelisted. Such inconsistent display would likely have confused media consumers and caused distrust. Site operators should improve interoperability to advance the utility and adoption of digital provenance as a concept.

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The future – comprehensive social media display and native smartphone integration

For digital provenance to really take off, social media sites must solve the "display challenge" by preserving, verifying and correctly displaying content credentials when present in an image or video.

As for capture, there are efforts underway to integrate provenance functionality into iOS and Android to automatically add C2PA credentials to all media captured natively. If the technology becomes thus "baked into" the operating system, digital provenance could become ubiquitous. Integrating the technology at operating system level should also make it more robust against manipulation by leveraging security hardware in phones to cryptographically protect the credentialing process. EOMs should make themselves familiar with the technology now, so that they are prepared when wider adoption occurs.

Persecution through metadata

With wider adoption does rise the threat of persecution through metadata, which can contain information identifying a specific smartphone and its owner. Providence signatures could be used by authoritarian governments to conveniently mass identify activists capturing evidence of repression. Each person taking a photo but wanting to keep their identity private would need to take great care and correctly configure their phone's C2PA settings to only include non-compromising data. The value of the evidence of authenticity provided by a C2PA signature must be carefully weighed against the threat to human rights generated by potentially providing a predatory regime with a convenient list of targets.

Conclusion

The Carter Center's pilot for using digital provenance credentialed images in Election Observation Missions resulted in a wealth of learnings. The technology shows promise for enhancing the credibility of media captured by EOMs, especially considering the increasing polarization of political spaces and the continued threat of AI generated deepfakes.

That said, the technology is far from mature. Capture apps could benefit from improvements in usability, and ideally support usage of institutional certificates to sign the media created. More importantly, the fragility of credentials and the scarcity of reliable display options, particularly on social media platforms, must be addressed before digital provenance's potential for defending online truth can be fully realized.

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Ingo Boltz has worked on the issues of electronic voting and biometric voter registration systems since 2006. He has been a core team member of international electoral observation missions and technical assistance projects of organizations such as the Carter Center, the OAS, UNDP, OSCE/ODIHR and DI. He has been a speaker at conferences, writes occasionally, and is a member of the Election Verification Network (EVN). His current focus is on Generative Artificial Intelligence in the context of political misinformation and election campaigns. He is helping The Carter Center design a program around these issues.

He can be contacted at ingo.boltz@gmail.com 

Electoral Integrity and Mexico’s Recall Referendum

In 2019, Mexico passed a constitutional reform that introduced the recall referendum, a mechanism to regulate whether the president’s term will conclude prematurely. The referendum is organized by Mexico’s National Electoral Institute (INE) and requires a validity threshold of 40% of registered voters. If this is met, the president is overthrown, provided that a majority votes for this. This exercise was held on 10 April 2022 with a small turnout of 17.77% of voters. Out of these, 91.8% voted for not recalling the president.

According to Mexico’s Constitution and Electoral Law, the recall referendum must be implemented in such a way that: citizens have a leading role in the process; that the playing field is levelled; and that there is no manipulation from the government. To ensure this, the referendum must be requested by citizens (at least 3% of those registered on the voter’s list), the use of public resources is prohibited, and all government propaganda is banned. Finally, INE and local election bodies are the only institutions authorized to promote the referendum.

In theory, this recall referendum should have been a citizen guided process, where voters decide autonomously whether the president keeps their job based on an evaluation of their performance. In practice, however, this first exercise played out quite differently, encountering serious election malpractice - Mexico’s Electoral Tribunal received a total of 6,939 legal challenges. For reviewing these we at the Electoral Tribunal applied a new legal approach we have been developing, consisting of judging with an ‘electoral integrity perspective’. The following is a sample of the irregularities found and the approach adopted by the Tribunal.

First, while the recall referendum was introduced in the Constitution in December 2019, its regulating law was not published until September 2021, 15 months after the deadline and when the process had already begun. In this regard, the Electoral Tribunal ruled that there was a “legislative omission” which violated citizen’s rights to participate. It was necessary to issue a specific law regulating the referendum and Congress was ordered to legislate. Furthermore, the published law was incomplete, which delayed the implementation of the process - an example being that the new law did not include relevant dispute resolution mechanisms[8].

Second, the budget to hold the referendum was insufficient. For 2022, INE requested budget to set up 162,570 polling stations, the same number of stations as a presidential election. However, Congress decided not to grant this budget and therefore INE could only set up about a third of stations (57,436). The Electoral Tribunal ruled that, despite this situation, the INE had to carry out the process to guarantee this direct democracy mechanism and with it, citizen’s rights.

Third, the process for collection of signatures needed to trigger the referendum was also problematic. Citizens flagged that they appeared on the petition to call the referendum without expressing their consent, and furthermore an NGO which promoted the recall referendum provided 14,490 formats with irregular information, pertaining to deceased citizens. In all these cases the Electoral Tribunal confirmed sanctions to individuals and organizations who presented false information.

Finally, this process was characterized by inequality, as the government and its party heavily promoted the referendum so the president would be ratified. The Electoral Tribunal identified that public officials disseminated propaganda when they were not allowed to do so by the Constitution. One case highlighted that 17 governors from the ruling party issued an unauthorized public statement supporting the president. Moreover, the president himself (also barred from participating, as the process was related to his own mandate) promoted his government’s achievements during public events.

As the recall referendum did not reach the required 40% turnout threshold, the Electoral Tribunal ruled it did not have any legal effects. All claims made were therefore not viable. However, the Tribunal stated that not meeting the threshold did not mean that certain irregularities should not be investigated, and if proven, punished. Therefore, the Tribunal provided different institutions files to investigate all irregularities and, where appropriate, sanction any illicit behavior. Claims ranged from accusations of party officials acting as polling officers, to people voting without a voter ID.

Mexico’s recall referendum brought a few key lessons. An electoral integrity perspective is usually applied only to traditional representative democracy elections – ranging from national level presidential contests to local municipal elections. However, as this novel exercise has shown us, we need to ensure that direct democracy processes are just as free and fair as other elections.

The malpractices encountered, from an inadequate legal framework, insufficient budget, irregularities in the collection of signatures to a lack of a playing field, show that direct democracy faces serious challenges in Mexico. Direct democracy should work as a tool for citizens to express their concerns, shape public policy and demand accountability. However, when not properly designed or implemented, these exercises can precisely prevent this goal.

Without electoral integrity, direct democracy exercises will not be able to achieve their full potential as a voice for citizens. This is why it is important to include this perspective when judging on electoral affairs, and this is what we did at the Tribunal. For us, the formula is simple: for any irregularity, the law should be applied; for any abuse or malpractice, political rights should be guaranteed.

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Reyes Rodríguez Mondragón has held positions in all three branches of the Mexican government, as well as in autonomous bodies. He has been a magistrate within the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary (TEPJF), both in the Regional Court in Monterrey and in the Superior Court. He was appointed as the Magistrate President of the TEPJF from 2021-2023.

Reyes holds a bachelor's degree in law from the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM) and pursued postgraduate studies at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) and the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Oñati, Spain. He is the author of various articles and academic publications, and has served as the director of the law program at CIDE.

The Global Electoral Integrity Report 2024

The Global Electoral Integrity Report 2024 has been published by the Electoral Integrity Project.

The report evaluates election quality around the world finds that elections in Sweden, Austria and Denmark hold contests which most empowers their citizens. 

The Electoral Integrity Global Report is published each year to provide data on election quality based on expert opinion.  The new release adds 42 new contests to the PEI dataset based on contests held in 2023. This report explores in more detail eight key contests in 2023: general elections in Zimbabwe, Turkey, Argentina, Nigeria, and Thailand, the presidential election in Egypt, and legislative elections in the Netherlands and Poland.

Like in previous years, indicators of the integrity of the campaign environment were the lowest scoring stages of the electoral cycle, with campaign finance and campaign media again at the bottom. Among the four key principles of electoral integrity, the deliberative environment likewise averaged the lowest scores.  Election procedures, the vote count, and the results stages of the electoral cycle were on average the top-scoring.

The release of the data also presents a number of changes to the methodology of aggregating the overall indices – which are widely used by international policy makers and academics. This follows a move to measure electoral integrity in terms of whether elections empower citizens and deliver democracy. There are now some additional questions in the survey designed to capture whether elections achieve this.  This represents theoretical work which will be published in a forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press.

The 4th iEIP International Online Conference in Review

The Electoral Integrity Project held the 4th Annual online conference during July 8-12 2024.

Elections are crucial to achieving democratic governance. This year’s virtual workshop focussed on the three major components of electoral integrity: electoral justice, participation and contestation.

The event was covened by Holly Ann Garnett (Royal Military College / Queen's University, Canada), Toby James (University of East Anglia, UK), Anna Unger (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary).

2024 was widely billed as the ‘year of elections’ with 2 billion people headed to the polls. Half way through the year, we asked an expert panel to examine how elections fared in their countries. What were the concerns ahead of election day? Did they come to pass? If not, why? Was electoral misinformation a problem? If so, how? The opening included experts discussing elections in India, Mexico, South Africa, Hungary and the UK.

The workshop also included a roundtable organised by IFES on EMB interdependence. Many of the impediments to EMB independence are widely known, and new research indicates that EMB autonomy is under increasing attack by governments. How to maintain EMB independence when interdependence with government agencies is required, however, is infrequently discussed and under-researched. The roundtable explored this challenge and ongoing work relevant to this topic by the Global Network for Securing Electoral Integrity (GNSEI), a new platform for election-focused organizations and networks to advance electoral integrity in the face of critical threats to democracy. Following GNSEI consultations with EMBs, election practitioners, international NGOs, citizen observer groups and networks, international donors and IGOs, the Network has drafted guidelines to support election management bodies (EMBs) to assert, protect, and promote their independence as they carry out their mandates in collaboration with other public institutions.

Overall the conference included over 300 participants from around the world, sharing research-based ideas and conversations about how to improve electoral integrity.

All sessions are available to watch on the YouTube Channel

Partisanship, Threats, and Violence: Unraveling the Complex Dynamics in American Democracy

By LAUREL HARBRIDGE-YONG (Professor, Northwestern University) and ALEXANDRA FILINDRA (Associate Professor, University of Illinois Chicago)

In 2020, Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan announced that she would not be seeking re-election. A central reason was threats of violence against her and her family. Ms. Durkan is not alone. In recent years, threats and violence have targeted public health officials, school board members, Congress members and staff, state legislators, mayors, and local election officials, among others. Several organizations such as the U.S. Capitol Police, the National League of Cities, the Bridging Divides Initiative, and the Brennan Center have produced reports raising concerns about this accelerating phenomenon and its potentially harmful effects on victims – officeholders and staff – and American democratic institutions. In 2022-2023, we conducted 110 in-depth interviews with subnational elected officials and staff. Everyone reported experiences with incivility, most respondents recounted threats of violence, and a small minority were exposed to actual violence. Clearly, America faces a problem of deteriorating democratic norms and an uptick in political violence.

In the face of this political landscape, we sought to understand how the partisan public responds to such events. When it comes to evaluating threats and violence against elected officials, does the public apply a consistent standard, informed by democratic norms, or does partisanship shape their evaluations? And if partisanship shapes their evaluations, do we face a vicious cycle where learning about political violence targeting your own party leads people to justify further political violence? Our initial research suggests that while partisanship shapes some aspects of public evaluations, people evaluate threats and violence similarly, regardless of the party targeted, and do not rationalize violence or become radicalized themselves; all hopeful signs for our democratic institutions.

Despite criticism of incivility and aggression from both sides of the political aisle, evaluations of civil, uncivil, and aggressive or violent behavior may not be politically neutral. This is because partisanship is a core part of people’s identity and shapes how they interpret events and information. Partisan identities create strong in-groups (copartisans) and out-groups (opposing partisans). Political scientists have shown that in-group favoritism is associated with different yardsticks for evaluating in-group and out-group legislators. Partisanship also plays a role in how people understand misbehavior. Partisans are more willing to rationalize and excuse in-group leaders’ misbehavior. They also  evaluate norms breaking by the in-group less severely than similar behavior by the out-group, and rationalize undemocratic behaviors if they promote desired policies. This suggests that incivility, threats, and even violence perpetrated by co-partisans toward an opposing party legislator may not be viewed as seriously or be seen as concerning as the same behaviors by opposing partisans toward a co-partisan legislator.

Another concern about the public response to threats and violence against elected officials is that learning about threats or violence, particularly if they are perpetrated by members of the opposing party and target an elected official from one’s in-group, might increase people’s willingness to rationalize violence or engage in violence themselves. We know that the public’s response to political violence is shaped by social identities.  When group identities are under threat, partisans can be induced to become radicalized and endorse violence towards members of the other side. Even though few endorse actual violence (e.g., physically harming people), support for the principle of political violence can nevertheless be harmful as it weakens democratic norms. 

We assessed public evaluations of threats and violence in two ways. First, we assessed whether the public differentiates between civil, uncivil, threatening, and violent interactions between constituents and elected officials when partisanship is not mentioned. We asked survey respondents to evaluate 40 short descriptions of interactions between constituents and an elected official. After reading each description, respondents selected which words best describe the behavior: civil, appropriate, uncivil, inappropriate, violent, and criminal. Second, we used a survey experiment to examine whether the partisanship of the elected official and constituents shaped the public’s response. Survey respondents read a mock news story that described an incident between a Senator and a large group of his constituents. This incident was described as a civil townhall meeting, a civil protest, a protest with threats made toward the Senator, or a protest with violence directed toward the Senator. We also randomized the partisanship of the Senator. The constituents were always described as being in the opposing party than the Senator.

The results of the first study suggest that people do recognize differences in civility/appropriateness within democratic politics as well as the severity of incidents; incivility is distinct from threats and violence. First, even when constituents are critical of the politician, people distinguish between responses that are civil from those that are uncivil or slurs. Second, people view uncivil interactions and slurs similarly. Third, people view threats and violence as distinct from merely uncivil interactions. Finally, although there are some similarities in how people view threats and violence in democratic politics, violence tends to be evaluated more harshly than threats. Importantly, Democrats and Republican evaluate these incidents similarly. Without the presence of partisan cues, the public recognizes what behaviors are inconsistent with democratic norms and which are not.

When people evaluate incidents where they know the partisanship of the elected official and the constituents, partisanship plays a more limited role than some scholarly literature might suggest. Regardless of whether the targeted Senator is from the in-group or the out-group, partisans in the public recognize threatening and violent protests as less appropriate and less civil than a civil townhall or civil protest and identify them as more criminal and violent. The partisanship of the target has no bearing on these evaluations. While in-group attachments do shape evaluations of the out-group when constituents from the opposing party target a Senator from your own party with threats or violence – i.e., feelings toward the opposing party and evaluations of the traits of party identifiers reflect greater animosity in the threats and violence conditions – there is little evidence that an attack against an in-group legislator leads people to rationalize violence or become radicalized toward violence. In today’s era of heightened partisan animosity, these are encouraging signs for our democratic politics. However, they leave open a question of whether responses to threats or violence from political elites – elected officials, major figureheads in the party, or partisan media organizations – might inflame partisanship and lead people to rationalize violence. This is the subject of our ongoing work. We are also probing the strength of the null findings in our experiment by exploring whether attacks on the partisan in-group increase animosity and support for violence if we raise the stakes of the vignette experiment – focusing on an issue the respondent views as moral in nature and where electoral competition between the parties is salient.

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Laurel Harbridge-Yong is a Professor of Political Science and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. She received her PhD in 2009 from Stanford University. Her research and teaching explores questions surrounding partisan conflict and the difficulty of reaching bipartisan agreements and legislative compromises in American politics. Her work spans projects on the U.S. Congress, state legislatures, and the mass public. She is the author of two books – Is Bipartisanship Dead? Policy Agreement and Agenda-Setting in the House of Representatives (2015) and Rejecting Compromise: Legislators’ Fear of Primary Voters (with Sarah Anderson and Daniel Butler, 2020) – and numerous journal articles.  

Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Unite America, the National Science Foundation Time Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences (TESS), the Social Science Research Council, and the Dirksen Congressional Center, among others. Her current research projects examine how primary elections shape representation, and how threats and violence against elected officials shape legislative behavior and whether the public rationalizes the use of political violence. 

Laurel is the EIP’s 2023 IFES Mannatt Fellow.

The EIP ECPR Workshop in Prague in Review

The Electoral Integrity Project hosted an workshop on ‘New Developments in Electoral Integrity Research’ at the ECPR General Conference in Prague, September 2023.

The workshop was co-convened by Leontine Loeber, Holly Ann Garnett and Toby James.

Holly Ann Garnett and Toby James introduced a proposed new framework for evaluating electoral integrity and reconfiguration of the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity Index.

There were five panels overall:

• Concepts of Electoral Integrity

• Campaigns and Election Finance

• Manipulation of Elections

• New Developments and Electoral Integrity

• Public Perceptions of Elections

For more information, please see the conference page.

The iEIP 2023 Conference in Review

The Electoral Integrity Project held it’s third international online conference in July 2023.

Around 500 participants joining from over 60 countries this year. There was an action packed agenda of 14 panels across the week. The workshop brought the EIP into it’s 12th year of conferneces.

The workshop comes at an important moment in time. There have been widespread concerns about democratic backsliding and a more uncertain international environment. In this age it is more important than ever, that academics, civil society groups, practitioners and the international community come together to monitor the quality of elections and identify solutions for improving elections.

The workshop began with an update about the latest trajectory in election quality around the world by drawing from the latest Global Electoral Integrity Report and dataset.

The opening panel (below) then focused how practitioners and academics can work together in a panel convened by ACE and chaired by IFES’s Cassandra Emmons.

The conference also featured panels on commitments for the Summit for Democracy and the use of technology in elections.

All of the recordings from the week’s workshops are now available on the conference webpage for review and re-watching.

The EIP 2023 Global Electoral Integrity Project report is launched

The new report from the Electoral Integrity Project has reported that election quality has held steady around the world – and increased in many countries. 

There have been widespread concerns about democratic backsliding around the world with the US launching a Summit for Democracy, asking countries to make commitments to support democratic reform. 

The Electoral Integrity Global Report notes that there is no evidence of an overall decline in the quality of elections worldwide since 2012.

There was an increase in election quality in many countries that received widespread international coverage.  Despite the president-hopeful Raila Odinga’s contestation of the election results, this election continued the upward trend in electoral integrity Kenya has seen since 2013.

Despite the protests from Bolsonaro supports, the 2022 presidential election in Brazil saw general stability in terms of electoral integrity across the board.

The 2022 midterm elections in the United States showed an improvement from the 2020 presidential election.

Denmark Leads

The Electoral Integrity Global Report publishes data on the quality of elections worldwide each year, based on expert perceptions. Denmark was reported as to having the highest quality elections internationally.

On a 100-point scale, elections with the highest levels of electoral integrity are once again in Western Europe, with Nordic countries Denmark (87) and Sweden (81) having some of the top-rated elections of 2022, alongside Austria (83) and Slovenia (80).

Elections with the lowest levels of electoral integrity included contests in countries from Sub-Saharan Africa (with the Republic of Congo (27), Angola (31) and Equatorial Guinea (16) having some of the lowest rated elections). These countries particularly struggled with electoral laws, the voting process, and/or the performance of electoral authorities. Outside of Africa, contests in Serbia (38) and Turkmenistan (23) were also included in the bottom five elections of 2022.

Regional variation continues, with the Nordic countries and Western Europe demonstrating consistently in high electoral integrity, while regions like Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa showcase a range of challenges and opportunities for improvement of electoral processes.  

Electoral campaigns the biggest weakness

The Index indicators of the integrity of campaign environment were the lowest scoring stages of the electoral cycle, with campaign finance and campaign media again at the bottom. Conversely, the election procedures, vote count and results were found to be the highest quality.  

Academics and practitioners to discuss electoral integrity

The Electoral integrity Project will be holding an international conference during the week of the 5th July which will bring together policy makers, academics and practitioners researching elections from over 50 countries are expected to attend quality.

 Dr Holly Ann Garnett said: “Some of the key challenges for electoral integrity remain those related to the campaign environment, with campaign finance and media among the lowest overall. Further work is needed to level the playing field and address concerns about the quality of information voters receive to make their deliberations.” 

Professor Toby S. James said:  ‘We certainly should not be complacent about the quality of elections.  The Global Electoral Integrity Report certainly shows, however, a story democratic resilience as much as backsliding.  The efforts of electoral officials, legislators and the international community to protect election quality in many countries should be noted and applauded.’

Election observers are important for democracy – but few voters know what they do

Authors: Thomas Molony (Senior Lecturer in African Studies, The University of Edinburgh); Robert Macdonald (Research Fellow in African Studies, The University of Edinburgh)

Originally Published in the Conversation February 23, 2023 2.11am EST

Members of a European Union election observation team speak to voters in Zimbabwe. Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images

Election observers keep watch over polls throughout the world. Their job is to support efforts to improve electoral quality and to provide transparency. In African countries, both local citizen and international observers have been deployed regularly since the 1990s.

During several recent elections across the continent, however, questions have arisen about the competence and impartiality of observation missions. This has led to concerns about the future of observation, both in Africa and elsewhere.

In 2023, more than 20 African countries are scheduled to go to the polls. It will be a busy year for observers who’ll be present at the majority of these elections.

When done well, election observation detects ballot-box stuffing, voter suppression and political violence. Observers’ presence at polling stations deters election-day fraud.

Observers also provide public statements about election quality and offer recommendations on how electoral processes could be improved.

Yet some observers have been criticised for a reluctance to point out flawed processes, for holding biases and for weaknesses in their methodologies.

The perception that observation missions’ verdicts were “proved wrong” by court judgements in Kenya (2017) and Malawi (2019) has been particularly damaging. In both cases, many commentators (mis)interpreted international observers’ statements as endorsements of electoral processes that the courts later annulled.

It’s not clear how widely held these critical views are. The perspectives of the broader public in countries holding elections are often missing from discussions on observation. So we set out to get a sense of what voters in three African countries thought.

We found that people wanted to know more about election observers, but couldn’t easily get the information. Both the media and observers need to do more to provide it. Knowledge of observers’ goals and statements is essential if they are to play the role of public arbiters of election quality.

What Citizens think

Our research into citizen perceptions and media representations of election observation took place in Zambia, The Gambia and Kenya. These three countries have had varying experiences of election observation.

We interviewed 520 citizens about topics relating to their perceptions of election observation. In each country, we conducted in-depth interviews in both urban and rural areas, and in constituencies that supported the opposition and the incumbent.

Ordinary citizens in our case study countries rarely offered criticisms of election observation.

For example, we asked 120 Kenyans to evaluate the past performance of election observers during the run-up to the country’s 2022 election. Only one person referred to the controversy surrounding observation in 2017 and the supreme court’s annulment of the presidential election.

Instead, we found strong support for election observation among citizens. This was the case in all three of our case study countries, which cover east, southern and west Africa.

Our respondents tended to have concerns about the electoral process in their own country. They spoke favourably about the potential of observation to improve overall electoral quality and transparency. They also felt that observers contributed to reducing the potentially destabilising effects of elections, such as violence.

In both Zambia and Kenya, support for the presence of international observers was higher than support for citizen observers. Respondents in The Gambia, however, tended to prefer citizen observers.

The explanations from those who chose international observers highlighted a perception that they were more impartial than citizen observers, who were often viewed as being biased or corruptible.

Perceptions in Zambia and Kenya may be influenced by:

• political polarisation

• a perception that political corruption is high

• the prominence of ethnicity in politics.

These factors appear to reduce confidence in citizen observers.

Despite the popularity of election observers in our case study countries, we found that citizens knew little about their roles. Few could name any specific observation missions. Citizens often confused observers with other electoral actors like polling station staff, the electoral management body and party agents.

It’s common for citizens to believe observers can and should intervene in the electoral process. Yet, non-interference should be a key principle for both citizen and international election observers.

The information gap

Our interviews made it clear that citizens – especially those in rural areas – found it difficult to get information about the activities and statements of election observers. Few of the respondents heard this information when missions issued their preliminary statements.

The media can bridge this information gap by providing more coverage of election observation.

The quality of this coverage could also be improved, as observers’ preliminary statements are often mischaracterised.

Observers’ statements tend to be complex and nuanced because they are commenting on numerous aspects of an ongoing process. In media coverage, these statements are often reduced to simple either/or judgements (such as “free and fair”).

Way forward

Our project has drawn upon interviews with African journalists and editors to create a short list of tips on covering election observation. These are designed to improve the circulation of accurate information. The tips include getting a range of perspectives from observer missions and reaching out to them early.

Observer missions could also be more active in raising the profile of their work. We created a list of suggestions from the media in our three case study countries to help them do this. One of the tips is to interact with the media in local languages.

Citizens are more likely to criticise observers for the poor flow of information than for anything else. This doesn’t invalidate other criticisms of observers. In fact, if citizens begin to get more information, these criticisms may become more common. Our research suggests the media and observers need to provide it anyway.

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Disclosure Statement:

Thomas Molony receives funding from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), for the ‘Local Perceptions and Media Representations of Election Observation in Africa’ research project, under grant reference ES/T015624/1.

Robert Macdonald receives funding from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), for the ‘Local Perceptions and Media Representations of Election Observation in Africa’ research project, under grant reference ES/T015624/1.

Elections in Hungary: 'Free and fair' is much more than election day

A free and fair election requires a context where – among other things – political parties and candidates can register and campaign freely, information is available for public deliberation, and votes are fairly translated into seats. These factors enable citizens to choose (and change) their government freely. However, these principles are under threat in many countries by populist authoritarian regimes that gain and maintain control through the manipulation of the media and autocratic legalism. The latter phenomenon is exemplified by the democratic façade created by leaders such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary, in an attempt to legitimize their regime. These leaders undermine democracy legally, make changes underneath the surface, and remove or control key democratic institutions and procedures. This undermines citizens' ability to make informed choices, rendering the election process a mere façade for the biases and manipulations behind the scenes. While election day itself might be mostly free of irregularities, especially since 2012, it is in the pre-voting phase where biases and manipulation are rooted.

The façade of the electoral system: gaining legitimacy with biased rules

Using elections to gain legitimacy is an old tactic: autocratic leaders from the Soviet Union to Cuba have used elections to create a democratic façade. In 2010, for the first time since the democratization of Hungary, power was concentrated in the hands of a single political power. Following the parliamentary elections in 2010, with a supermajority, the Fidesz-KDNP Party Alliance introduced a new electoral law written behind closed doors and without plural political debate. Without any transparency, the government created a new map of constituencies with districts that varied drastically in size and heavily benefitted Orbán’s party coalition Fidesz-KDNP. In addition, the law replaced two-round elections in single-member constituencies with a majority support with a Winner-Take-All system; legalized “voter-tourism”; “winner compensation”; and strategically granted citizenship and voting rights to 450,000 near-abroad citizens who were known to support Fidesz. These innovations helped him secure a two-thirds majority in both 2014 and 2018. Viktor Orbán and his party alliance are also constantly changing the law to make it more difficult for the opposition to unite and campaign.

This unfair nature of the electoral system contributed to the outstanding success of Fidesz in previous elections, along with the manipulation of media. Orbán transformed the majority of the traditional media outlets into pro-government propaganda, reducing market plurality and political independence of the media.

Assessing the façade

The OSCE’s ODIHR Election Observation Mission concluded that although election day in 2022 only experienced minor irregularities, the election, in general, was “marred by the absence of a level playing field”. This is supported by the Electoral Integrity Project’s evaluation of the quality of elections in Hungary. As Figure 1 shows, while election day activities (voting process, vote count and vote results) score relatively well, the rest of the components – related to the broader environment in which elections take place – score significantly lower.  Low scores on electoral laws, boundary delimitation, campaign media and campaign finance reveal the true nature of Orbán’s electoral authoritarianism. We see in these data a system which seemingly looks democratic but does not offer real opportunities for competition.

Figure 1. Perceptions of Electoral Integrity, Hungary

Call for a closer look

In 2022, the European Parliament deemed Hungary undemocratic, assigning the label of electoral autocracy to its regime. In response, the country’s Foreign Minister, Péter Szijjártó, used the narrative of the elections to legitimize their regime and criticised the European Parliament due to their lack of respect towards Hungary's electorate. However, while in Hungary there are no military personnel encouraging you to vote, and ballots are not marked beforehand, elections still take place in a

system designed by the ruling party alliance and where the opposition cannot campaign with equal conditions and is denied the same opportunities for winning seats. Just because votes are not stolen systematically on election day does not mean that citizens are not robbed of having real options. As the data shows, the Hungarian electorate is deprived of this right. This raises doubts about the possibility of the democratic removal of Orbán's regime, even if the opposition unites. Thus, a thorough examination is required to understand how to challenge such regimes in the future.

Sandor Adam Gorni is a final year master's student in political science at Uppsala University. His academic interests include democratic backsliding, right-wing populism, political participation, voting behaviour, and post-soviet political culture.

How the Far-Right Won in Italy: A Story of Coalitions and Electoral Law

Italy gained global attention this September when, in their first general election since 2018, they elected Fratelli d'Italia – a far right party considered neo-fascist by some – to a majority of seats in parliament. Many attribute Fratelli d’Italia’s success to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s populist rhetoric and her party’s appealing status as the standout opposition to the now-failed Draghi government. However, an underexplored explanation for the win of Fratelli d’Italia and the broader far-right coalition is Italian electoral law and its impact on coalition building.

Italian parliamentary coalitions have typically been short-lived and made up of volatile party alliances. Italy has had an unprecedented number of electoral reforms––five since World War II, which is significantly more than most other modern democracies. These reforms address nearly ever aspect of Italian elections. 2017 saw the most recent major change in Italian election law. By examining specific aspects and implications of the 2017 Rosatellum legislation (formally Rosatellum bis) and considering expert evaluations of recent Italian elections from the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI) dataset, we can put together the story of 2022’s winning coalition in the context of the new Italian electoral landscape.

Specifically, the 2018 national election saw a complex transformation of seat allocation in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate due to the changes from Rosatellum. Designed to foster political stability and strengthen coalitions, Rosatellum provided the electoral setup for Italy’s most conservative government in decades.

NEW SEAT ALLOCATION AND VOTE THRESHOLDS

In the last 70 years, Italy has alternated between allocating seats by pure proportional representation and by varying mixed electoral systems, but in the period between 2005 and 2017 the Italian parliament was elected through a fully proportional system. Rosatellum introduced a new mixed system in which 36% of seats are won via first-past-the-post elections in single-member districts and the other 64% of seats are allocated proportionally in multi-member districts. In proportionally-allocated districts, coalitions must submit closed candidate lists before the election. Additionally, parliamentarians in the Chamber of Deputies, Italy’s lower house, were previously elected through multiple rounds of elections conducted until one party reached a majority, but Rosatellum sets only one election round where the candidate with the most votes takes the seat.

Rosatellum also established new electoral thresholds to incentivise coalition formation. Before 2017, parties ran independently for proportionally-allocated seats, and coalitions were not allowed on the ballot. To compensate for this, an automatic majority of seats was awarded to any party that won over 40% of the national vote. Rosatellum eliminated this, and now requires parties and coalitions to receive over 50% of the vote. Additionally, parties need to receive at least 3% of the overall vote and coalitions need to receive at least 10% to be in contention for proportionally-allocated seats.

Figure 1: Election fairness indicies measured by PEI data from Italy. Each variable presented has a minimum possible value of 1 and a maximum possible value of 5.

By changing seat allocation procedures and setting these thresholds for parties––and more importantly, for coalitions––small parties that coalesce with more mainstream parties became even more crucial than before. The increased importance of smaller parties is reflected in post-election data from the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity Index, compiled by the Electoral Integrity Project. PEI data, collected through post-election expert surveys, indicate that in Italy, there was a notable increase in the fairness of electoral laws toward smaller parties between the 2013 national election and the 2018 national election, shown in Figure 1.

In 2013, expert assessment showed smaller parties had more of an electoral disadvantage than under the Rosatellum law. It appears that Rosatellum had a positive impact on coalition building, as measured by the increased access of small parties to government. This was a step toward greater electoral integrity in Italy and one with immediate political impacts.  

The importance of small party support limited the pool of viable coalitions in 2022. Partito Democratico, one of Italy’s most prominent parties, struggled to repair fractured relationships with once-allied parties on the left. This was crucial to their electoral success because of two other aspects of Rosatellum: the requirement of pre-election coalition declarations and the elimination of split-ticket voting.

COALITION DECLARATION AND SPLIT-TICKET VOTING ELIMINATION

Rosatellum established a form of closed list voting in which parties both decide the set lists of candidates and can formally nominate the same candidate as other members of the coalition. Voters then choose to cast their ballots either for a specific candidate (and thus their national vote is cast for the party or coalition that nominated that candidate) or cast their ballots for a party (and thus their district vote is cast for the candidate nominated by the party or broader coalition). However, Rosatellum completely eliminated ticket-splitting, or voting for different parties on the same ballot. Specifically, Italian voters must vote for the same party or coalition for both district seats (where they are voting for a specific candidate) and in the national-level vote on the same ballot. As expected, this trend was evident in PEI data from 2018. When comparing 2013 to 2018, experts agreed with the statement “only top party leaders selected candidates” more strongly under the Rosatellum than prior Italian election law, indicating an decline in electoral integrity[1]. Figure 2 shows just how much lower Italy scores on this question than the rest of the region, especially considering its score on the full PEI index.

Figure 2: Overall electoral integrity index compared to ‘Only top party leaderes selected candidates’ variable from PEI_8.0. Both variables reflect the most recent national election as of April 2022 for the 115 counties assessed by the dataset. The variable measuring leaders’ role in candidate selection has a minimum possible value of 1 and a mximumum possible value of 5, with higher values denoting higher integrity. The PEI index has a minimum possible value of 0 and a maximum possible value of 100.

Figure 2 positions the 115 countries included in the PEI dataset on a scatterplot where each country’s electoral integrity index value (0-100) is displayed on the x-axis and the country’s score on the variable measing party leaders’ level of influence over the selection of candidates (1-5) is displayed on the y-axis. Compared to Italy’s score on the overall index, Italy has a very low score of leaders’ role in candidate selection (and thus lower level of integrity). On this variable, Italy scores similarly to nations with much lower values for overall electoral integrity, such as Banglasesh, Syria, and Venezuela.

These electoral changes have made pre-election coalitions vital to success on election day: if two or more parties can agree to declare a coalition and formally nominate the same candidates, they can capitalize on the new majoritarianism by which a significant number of seats are allocated.

This is exactly what happened in 2022. Partito Democratico failed to form a coalition with Movimento 5 Stelle, Azione, or Italia Viva, despite the fact that, if formally together on the ballot, the center left coalition was projected to capture a similar percentage of the national vote as the right-wing coalition, according to pre-election polls. However, these parties could not agree to run together, and instead, Partito Democratico, Movimento 5 Stelle, and the Azione-Italia Viva coalition each ran their own candidates instead of unifying behind a common candidate in each district.

In contrast, the right-wing alliance of Fratelli d’Italia, Forza Italia, and Lega, which differ very little in party platform, unified behind a single candidate from one of the right-wing parties in every district. That is to say, there was only one conservative option on the ballot in any district, whereas there were many more liberal candidates to choose from, thus diluting votes for the left since the party of the candidate with the most votes wins. With the new majoritarian seat allocation, barring one extremely popular party, the only way to be in contention for government control was through formalized pre-election coalitions. Though Partito Democratico, Movimento 5 Stelle, and the Azione-Italia Viva coalition (the liberal parties) actually received a larger percentage of votes overall in the country, they failed to secure the first-past-the-post seats required to take control of the Italian government. The three right-wing parties were able to coalesce in an alliance that allowed their dominance in majoritarian races.

In 2022, the electoral reforms introduced by Rosatellum gave Italy’s right-wing parties a significant advantage. Ultimately, Fratelli d’Italia and their coalition capitalized on the particulars of recent electoral reform through a combination of strategy and good old-fashioned luck.

Rosatellum’s critics argue that coalition incentives aren’t enough to build political stability in Italy, since parties, as they assert, will continue to form unstable alliances that threaten to implode. Compared to the global average, recent Italian elections have been clean, free, and fair, and there doesn’t appear to be an active threat to Italian democracy in light of current electoral law or the right-wing wave. However, more years of political instability and constant reform might reduce Italian voters’ faith in the quality and representative nature of their own elections.

Only time will tell how long Meloni’s government can stay in power, though her coalition comfortably won in recent regional elections. Whenever the next national election is held, coalitions and the electoral law that governs them will still play a fundamental role in who leads Italy.

[1] Question 5-4b. of PEI 8.0 asks for agreement with the statement “Only top party leaders selected candidates.” This is the reversed coding of the previous question (5-4a.) such that higher values denote higher electoral integrity.

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Ansley Langham is an undergraduate student at Emory University, Atlanta.

Local election offices often are missing on social media – and the information they do post often gets ignored

Originally published August 31, 2022 8.27am EDT on The Conversation.

Authors: Thessalia Merivaki and Mara Suttmann-Lea

Local election officials are trying to share voting information with the public on social media but may be missing some key platforms – and the voters who use them.

In early July 2022, for instance, young voters in Boone County, Missouri, complained that they had missed the registration deadline to vote in the county’s Aug. 2 primary election. They claimed no one “spread the word on social media.” The local election office in that county actually has a social media presence on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok. But its accounts don’t have many followers and aren’t as active as, say, celebrity or teenage accounts are. As a result, election officials’ messages may never reach their audience.

The Boone County example raises important questions about how prospective voters can get informed about elections, starting with whether or not local election officials are active on social media and whether they use these platforms effectively to “spread the word.”

In our research as scholars of voter participation and electoral processes, we find that when local election officials not only have social media accounts but use them to distribute information about voting, voters of all ages – but particularly young voters – are more likely to register to vote, to cast ballots and to have their ballots counted.

For example, during the 2020 election, Florida voters who lived in counties where the county supervisor of elections shared information about how to register to vote on Facebook, and included a link to Florida’s online voter registration system, were more likely to complete the voter registration process and use online voter registration.

In North Carolina, we found that voters whose county board of elections used Facebook to share clear information about voting by mail were more likely to have their mailed ballots acceptedthan mail voters whose county boards did not share instructions on social media.

Young people face distinct voting challenges

Voter participation among young voters, those between the ages of 18 and 24, has increased in recent elections, but still lags behind that of older voters. One reason is that younger voters have not yet established a habit of voting.

Even when they do try to vote, young voters face more barriers to participation than more experienced voters. They are more likely than older people to make errors or omissions on their voter registration applications and therefore not be successfully registered.

When they do successfully complete the registration process, they have more trouble casting a vote that will count, especially when it comes to following all the steps required for voting by mail. When they try to vote in person, evidence from recent elections shows high provisional voting rates in college towns, suggesting college students may also experience trouble in casting a regular ballot owing to confusion about finding their polling place, or because they are not registered to vote because their voter registration application was not successfully processed.

Some of these problems exist because voters, especially young ones, don’t know what they need to do to meet the voter eligibility requirements set by state election laws. Those laws often require registering weeks or months in advance of Election Day, or changing their registration information even if they move within a community.

Social media as a tool to ‘spread the word’

Social media can be a way to get this important information out to a wider audience, including to the young voters who are more likely to need it.

Younger people use social media more than older voters, with a strong preference for platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat.

News outlets and political campaigns use social media heavily. But our analysis finds that the vast majority of local election officials don’t even have social media accounts beyond Facebook. And, when they do, it is likely that they are not effectively reaching their audience.

Gaps in how local election officials use social media

We have found that during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, 33% of county election offices had Facebook accounts. Facebook is the most commonly used social media platform among Americans of all ages. But two-thirds of county election offices didn’t even have a Facebook account.

Just 9% of county election offices had Twitter accounts, and fewer than 2% had accounts on Instagram or TikTok, which are more popular with young voters than Twitter or Faceboook.

Using social media for voter education

Local election officials are charged with sharing information about the voting process – including the mechanics of registering and voting, as well as official lists of candidates and ballot questions.

Their default method of making this information available is often to share it on their own government websites. But young voters’ regular use of social media presents an opportunity for officials to be more active and engaged on those sites.

While many election officials around the country face budget and staffing pressures, as well as threats to their safety, our research confirms that when officials do get involved on social media, young voters benefit – as does democracy itself.

Thessalia Merivaki is Assistant Professor of American Politics at Mississippi State University.

Mara Suttmann-Lea is Assistant Professor of Government, Connecticut College

Disclosure Statement

Thessalia (Lia) Merivaki is an Assistant Professor of American Politics at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Mississippi State University and a member of the Carter Center's U.S. Elections Expert Study Team. She has received funding from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab (MEDSL) and the Scholars Strategy Network (SSN). She is also affiliated with the Election Community Network (ECN).

Mara Suttmann-Lea is an Assistant Professor of American Politics in the Department of Government and International Relations at Connecticut College. They have received funding from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab and the Social Science Research Council.

How does Australia’s voting system work?

Originally published May 17, 2022 3.06am EDT on The Conversation.

Author: Malcolm Mackerras

As you head to your local polling place this Saturday, or cast your ballot in an early vote, it’s worth pondering: how does Australia’s voting system really work, anyway?

The fundamentals of our electoral system have been shaped by democratic values enshrined in Australia’s Constitution and pragmatic decisions made by federal politicians since 1901.

I’ve been studying elections and electoral systems for some 65 years.

Here’s what you need to know to understand how the vote you cast this election fits into the bigger picture.

How long are politicians’ terms?

For members of the House of Representatives – three years.

Section 28 of the Constitution says:

Every House of Representatives shall continue for three years from the first meeting of the House, and no longer, but may be sooner dissolved by the Governor-General.

Since the prime minister advises the governor general, it means he or she makes the exact choice of date. Many people object to that, but I don’t. That power hasn’t been abused.

The now dissolved term (the 46th Parliament) was elected in May 2019, so it has run a full term.

Why do we have more seats in the House than the Senate?

The Constitution says there must be approximately double the number of seats in the House compared to the Senate.

Section 24 says:

The House of Representatives shall be composed of members directly chosen by the people of the Commonwealth, and the number of such members shall be, as nearly as practicable, twice the number of the senators.

The September 1946 election saw 74 members of the House of Representatives elected to the 18th Parliament (1946-49). There were 36 senators then, six from each of the six states.

Since 1984 there have been 76 senators, 12 from each state and two from each territory.

There are currently 151 seats in the House, which therefore meets the requirement “as nearly as practicable twice the number” of senators.

How are electoral boundaries drawn?

Electoral boundaries are drawn so there are similar numbers of voters in each seat.

Section 24 of the Constitution reads:

The number of members chosen in the several States shall be in proportion to the respective numbers of their people…

The number of 151 electorates was determined mid-way during the 45th Parliament (2016-19). In August 2017 the electoral commissioner, Tom Rogers, issued the latest population statistics and determined there should be 47 members from New South Wales, 38 Victoria, 30 Queensland, 16 Western Australia, 10 South Australia, five Tasmania, three ACT and two for the Northern Territory.

Where necessary, electoral boundaries are re-drawn according to the principle of “one vote, one value” or, as I prefer to say, equal representation for equal numbers of people.

In July 2020, Rogers acknowledged population growth was above average in Victoria and below average in Western Australia.

That is why the forthcoming election will see 39 members elected in Victoria (up one) and 15 in WA (down one). New boundaries will apply in those two states and the redistributions have been done fairly and with maximum transparency, as always.

Elsewhere the boundaries will be the same as in May 2019.

How are Senators elected?

Since 1949 the system has been one of proportional representation.

That means within each state six Senate seats are roughly distributed according to a party’s share of the vote. So a party getting about 12% of the vote would win one seat, about 26% two seats, about 40% three seats and so on.

This is why the Greens do so well at Senate elections compared to the House of Representatives. With about 10% of the vote for both houses, they presently have nine senators but only one member of the House of Representatives.

This differs from preferential voting for the House of Representatives, introduced in 1918, where voters number candidates in the order of their preferences – first choice, second choice and so on.

How long are senators’ terms?

Senators from the states serve six year terms, and those from the territories serve three year terms.

However, a system of rotation means half the senators’ terms end every three years. So in most elections, half the Senate spots are contested.

But there’s an exception to this rule. Every so often there’s a “double dissolution”, where the entire Senate is elected. That happened most recently in 2016. This parliament was dissolved early because there was a dispute between the two houses, so the entire parliament faced the people.

In a double dissolution, half the senators from the states get three year terms instead of six. This is based on the number of votes.

One Nation’s Pauline Hanson and Larissa Waters of the Greens are good examples of how it works.

Both were elected among the 12 Queenslanders at the 2016 election. However, Hanson was one of the six more popular vote winners, and Waters one of the six less popular vote winners. So, Hanson got a six-year term and Waters a three-year term.

Waters won a higher proportion of votes in the 2019 election, so was elected to a six-year term, expiring on June 30 2025.

Hanson is up for re-election this year, and I predict she will be elected to a six-year term, and therefore her term would expire on 30 June 2028.

Issues with our voting system

About 16.5 million votes will be cast for each house of parliament.

Based on the last two federal elections, I estimate the informal vote will be roughly 800,000 for the House of Representatives (4.9%) and 650,000 for the Senate (3.9%).

By world standards that’s a high number of informal votes, which is thought by many to be a blot on our democracy.

Two reasons for this are because we have compulsory voting, and because ballot papers are unnecessarily complex and voter unfriendly, particularly for the Senate.

The United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada and New Zealand have voluntary voting and simple one-house ballot papers, and the rate of informal voting is negligible. Some argue we should copy them.

There’s also a lack of rules around campaign finance – the stand-out case being the obscene spending by Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party.

I argue there’s no need to reform the Constitution and the democratic values it upholds. But there should be legislative changes to improve the system. I expect some democratic reforms during the next term, 2022-25, the 47th Parliament.

These changes wouldn’t require a referendum, just negotiation to ensure passage through both houses. By contrast, changes to the Constitution require a referendum. For that reason reforms by referendum are rare.

Malcolm Mackerras is Distinguished Fellow at the PM Glynn Institute, Australian Catholic University.

Why public trust in elections is being undermined by global disinformation campaigns

Originally published April 28, 2022 10.27am EDT on The Conversation.

Author: Christoph Bluth

Public trust in elections is being targeted around the world by a series of disinformation campaigns from a range of international players. This is giving rise to an increasing lack of trust in how votes are counted.

The almost unlimited capacity for individuals and organisations to publish information using websites (only limited by time and manpower), social media and other outlets has given disinformation campaigns a set of new media to manipulate in the last decade.

With the Brazilian election coming up this autumn, analysts have already suggested that public trust in voting processes is being targeted, with similar tactics to those used around the last US presidential election. Like former US president Donald Trump, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has started undermining public confidence in the democratic process by claiming that elections were fraudulent.

Bolsonaro has also raised questions about both electronic voting and the vote-counting process.

Disinformation campaigns often begin well before elections to create confusion and allow the losers to challenge results. During Mexico’s 2021 election disinformation was spread through social networks in a bitter and polarised campaign. There was evidence of organised trolls spreading insults and attacks against candidates, and a rise in fake news stories about the election.

These tactics are being used across the world. The European Parliament said the “most systemic threats to political processes and human rights arise from organised attempts to run coordinated campaigns across multiple social media platforms”. A 2019 report discovered evidence of organised social media manipulation campaigns in 70 different countries, employing armies of “cyber troops” (300,000 in China for instance) to influence public opinion on various issues, and create political chaos. And a US foundation has raised concerns about new state laws shifting election administration powers to political or partisan bodies.

People voting in Mexico’s 2021 election where social media disinformation and fake news tactics were widely reported.Reuters/Alamy

A Chinese disinformation campaign to discredit presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen, and another against Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists were reported on. Twitter took down 900 fake accounts used by the Chinese authorities and another 200,000 new accounts linked with another Chinese network.

How do they work?

Disinformation campaigns often rely on an enormous volume of messages, using a variety of methods. They use traditional media such as newspapers, radio broadcasts and television, but disinformation is also spread via websites, social media, chat rooms, and satellite broadcasting and include a whole mix of texts, photographs and videos using thousands of fake accounts.

Internet “troll farms” are often set up, with teams of people putting out misleading messages to counter political viewpoints or other narratives. These farms employ workers on 12-hour shifts, 24 hours a day, with daily quotas of 135 posted messages per day, per worker.

One example is the Russian Internet Research Agency (also known as Glavset), ostensibly a private company but one that appears to be funded by the Russian government(now operating under different guises as part of “Project Lakhta”). It spreads Kremlin disinformation on social media using false identities and false information, under different names.

Using a variety of sources that employ different narratives and arguments but point to the same conclusion is more persuasive, because it conceals the fact that the propaganda ultimately derives from the same source. A study conducted by the Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government on the use of Twitter as a forum for disinformation found: “Evidence from an analysis of Twitter data reveals that Russian social media trolls exploited racial and political identities to infiltrate distinct groups of authentic users, playing on their group identities.”

Russia is also accused of mounting various campaigns to influence elections, including the presidential elections in the US in 2016 and 2020. Academic analysis of how the Russian Internet Research Agency used social media showed how they specifically targeted “self-described Christian patriots, supporters of the Republican party and of presidential candidate Donald Trump”.

The Russian governing elite believes that the west is committed to transforming the post-Soviet countries using non-military instruments of warfare, including economic instruments, the spreading of ideas about democracy and human rights, and support for NGOs and human rights activists with the purpose of inducing “colour revolutions” that will topple governments. By conducting information warfare Russia claims it is only responding to western methods.

The overall purpose is to create mistrust of the core institutions of liberal democracy including parliaments, mainstream media, elections and the judiciary.

Governments can respond by introducing regulations to combat the spread of disinformation, but this is controversial because it forces governments to define the limits of free speech. In practice, it means introducing and further developing elaborate codes of practice and guidelines for the internet and social media. Another tool is the development of fact-checkingnetworks.

If disinformation creates a widespread public belief that elections are “stolen” or manipulated, it undermines belief in public institutions that are essential to democratic governance. Therefore such disinformation campaigns can pose a very serious threat to liberal democracy and public order. This is the outcome that some of the state actors are seeking. The development of the instruments to deal with this challenge is only just beginning.

Christoph Bluth is Professor of International Relations and Security at the University of Bradford

Ireland has moved to improve electoral integrity – other countries should follow suit

Originally published July 15, 2022 on LSE’s EUROPP

Authors: Harsh Vasani, Toby James, and Holly Ann Garnett

On 13 July, Ireland passed an Electoral Reform Bill aimed at improving the country’s electoral integrity. Harsh Vasani, Toby S. James and Holly Ann Garnett assess the likely impact of the bill and the potential lessons other countries could draw from it.

Throughout the world, there have been concerns democracy has been ‘backsliding’ and that electoral integrity is under threat. A Summit for Democracy was hosted by the United States in December last year to ‘set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies’. Countries have been asked to make commitments to how they will improve democracy and elections.

The Irish government committed to establishing an independent statutory Electoral Commission. Academic research on electoral integrity and international best practices are clear that those involved in running and regulating elections should be independent from those standing from elections. However, many countries retain a system whereby government minsters have considerable control over electoral watchdogs, which compromises their independence. When Ireland gained independence from Britain, it established a system whereby elections were in the portfolio of a government minister and department – most recently the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage.

This commitment to establish a statutory, independent Electoral Commission for Ireland was honoured when an Electoral Reform Bill was passed on 13 July. But the Bill went further. The bill also promises the regulation of online political advertising with the aim of ensuring ‘transparency during electoral campaigns and… that our elections remain free from hidden influences on how we vote’.

The legislation came amidst calls to ban cryptocurrency donations to political parties. Given the identity of donors can be concealed when using cryptocurrencies, there are concerns such donations could create an avenue for foreign funding to influence election results. Donations made to political parties will also be scrutinised and the leader of each political party will have to declare to the Standards in Public Office Commission all donations to the party from outside the state, including all contributions, whether in cash or kind. Political parties will also be required to declare all the properties they own.

These reforms are important, too. The wider context is that there are major concerns about the possibility of foreign interference in elections. The alleged Russian interference in US elections cast light on the dangers of foreign interference in elections and manipulation of the electorate. It has been suggested that we have therefore entered an era of ‘cyber elections’.

Ireland’s electoral integrity weak spots

The legislation has been in the news for many weeks vis-à-vis electoral funding, foreign interference, online disinformation, and empowering the election commission. But does it speak to the problems that Ireland actually faces with elections?

The Electoral Integrity Project recently published the 2022 Electoral Integrity Global Report that scores countries on the quality of electoral integrity around the world. The report evaluates all aspects of elections – from the laws through the campaign and voter registration. The report is based on a rolling survey of 4,591 experts across 169 countries. Figure 1 illustrates Ireland’s areas of strength and weakness over the past decade. The data from the Electoral Integrity Project is available online here.

Figure 1: Country-level scores for electoral integrity in Ireland

Note: The figure is based on the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI-8.0) index, 2012-21.

The data shows that Ireland scores the poorest on voter registration. The scores on voter registration were 34 for the period of 2012-18. A comparison with Finland (95-96), Sweden (88-90) and Denmark (93-91), the three highest scorers on the perceptions of electoral integrity (PEI) index, illustrates just how poorly Ireland fares on perceptions of voter registration.

The voter registration index is measured on indicators such as whether some citizens were not listed in the register, the electoral register was inaccurate, or some ineligible electors were registered. Figure 2 illustrates the extent to which these were a problem on a five-point scale. Citizens missing from the electoral register was the greatest problem – but it was also the case that the register contained ineligible electors.

Figure 2: Electoral registration problems in Ireland

Note: The figure is based on the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI-8.0) index, 2012-21.

The good news is that the Bill also contains provisions to improve voter registration. These include a move to continuous registration based on an individual application, data sharing to assist registration authorities in updating and maintaining the register, and annual reporting by registration authorities to the newly established Commission.

The establishment of the Commission could therefore play an important role in redressing these problems in the coming years. In particular, the legislation enables the Commission to undertake research on the accuracy and completeness of the register – research which has generated important insights in the UK to reveal the extent of the ‘missing millions’.

Other dimensions of electoral integrity have fared better in Ireland. Vote counting and results work very well. The electoral finance index is more troubled with a score of 64. But it is worth noting that problems with money and elections are a huge problem worldwide – the Electoral Integrity Project report found that it was the weakest aspect of elections worldwide. The world should therefore watch closely to see if Ireland’s new legislation works – and whether there is an improvement in future report scores.

Looking forward: automatic voter registration?

Given that voter registration is the main weakness, it is notable that there are, however, policy fixes which are not legislated for, which should be considered in future years as the Electoral Reform Bill beds in. Many countries have recently moved to introduce some aspect of automatic voter registration. Rather than relying on individual applications (a requirement for individual applications reduces voter registration levels), voters can be registered by the authorities without requiring electors to take action. Comparative research shows that this can improve completeness and does not affect accuracy.

It is difficult for countries like Ireland to introduce this system without a civil population register. A more appropriate approach, as a recent voter registration report shows, is therefore to automatically enrol the population when they reach critical life moments such as becoming eligible to vote for the first time. Nonetheless, Ireland has been proactive in responding to the call to strengthen democratic electoral institutions. Other countries should do the same, and the Electoral Integrity Report can help them to do so.

Harsh Vasani is a PhD student in the School of Development at the University of East Anglia.

Toby S. James is Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the University of East Anglia. He is co-Director of the Electoral Integrity Project and Editor in Chief of Policy Studies.

Holly Ann Garnett is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, and cross-appointed faculty at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She is co-Director of the Electoral Integrity Project.

Featured image credit: European Council

Elections: a global ranking rates US weakest among liberal democracies

Originally published June 1, 2022 8.21am EDT on The Conversation.

Authors: Toby S. James, Holly Ann Garnett

A disappointing slide for the US after an election blighted by disinformation. Aaron Burson/Unsplash

Defending democracy has suddenly become one of the central challenges of our age. The land war in Ukraine is widely considered a front line between autocratic rule and democratic freedom. The United States continues to absorb the meaning of the riot that took place on January 6 2021 in an attempt to overthrow the result of the previous year’s election. Elsewhere, concerns have been raised that the pandemic could have provided cover for governments to postpone elections.

Elections are an essential part of democracy. They enable citizens to hold their governments to account for their actions and bring peaceful transitions in power. Unfortunately, elections often fall short of these ideals. They can be marred by problems such as voter intimidation, low turnout, fake news and the under-representation of women and minority candidates.

Our new research report provides a global assessment of the quality of national elections around the world from 2012-21, based on nearly 500 elections across 170 countries. The US is the lowest ranked liberal democracy in the list. It comes just 15th in the 29 states in the Americas, behind Costa Rica, Brazil, Trinidad & Tobago and others, and 75th overall.

An election in Costa Rica, which ranked well in the list. Ingmar Zahorsky/FLickr, CC BY-NC-SA

Why is the United States so low?

There were claims made by former president Donald Trump of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Theses claims were baseless, but they still caused the US elections ranking to fall.

Elections with disputed results score lower on our rankings because a key part of democracy is the peaceful transition of power through accepted results, rather than force and violence. Trump’s comments led to post-election violence as his supporters stormed the Capitol building and sowed doubt about the legitimacy of the outcome amongst much of America.

This illustrates that electoral integrity is not just about designing laws – it is also dependent on candidates and supporters acting responsibly throughout the electoral process.

The Perceptions of Electoral Integrity Index by country (most recent election) and region: Perceptions of electoral integrity are measured by experts for each country one month after polls close. Experts are asked to assess the quality of national elections on 11 sub-dimensions: electoral laws; electoral procedures; district boundaries; voter registration; party registration; media coverage; campaign finance; voting process; vote count; results; and electoral authorities. These items sum to an overall Electoral Integrity Index scored from 0 to 100. F. Electoral Integrity Project.

Problems with US elections run much deeper than this one event, however. Our report shows that the way electoral boundaries are drawn up in the US are a main area of concern. There has been a long history of gerrymandering, where political districts are craftily drawn by legislators so that populations that are more likely to vote for them are included in a given constituency – as was recently seen in North Carolina.

Voter registration and the polls is another problem. Some US states have recently implemented laws that make it harder to vote, such as requiring ID, which is raising concern about what effect that will have on turnout. We already know that the costs, time and complexity of completing the ID process, alongside the added difficulties for those with high residential mobility or insecure housing situations, makes it even less likely that under-represented groups will take part in elections.

Nordics on top, concern about Russia

The Nordic countries of Finland, Sweden and Denmark came out on top in our rankings. Finland is commonly described as having a pluralistic media landscape, which helps. It also provides public funding to help political parties and candidates contest elections. A recent report from the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights found a “high level of confidence in all of the aspects of the electoral process”.

Cape Verde has the greatest quality of electoral integrity in Africa. Taiwan, Canada and New Zealand are ranked first for their respective continents.

Electoral integrity in Russia has seen a further decline following the 2021 parliamentary elections. A pre-election report warned of intimidation and violence against journalists, and the media “largely promote policies of the current government”. Only Belarus ranks lower in Europe.

Globally, electoral integrity is lowest in Comoros, the Central African Republic and Syria.

Money matters

How politicians and political parties receive and spend money was found to be the weakest part of the electoral process in general. There are all kinds of threats to the integrity of elections that revolve around campaign money. Where campaign money comes from, for example, could affect a candidate’s ideology or policies on important issues. It is also often the case that the candidate who spends the most money wins – which means unequal opportunities are often part and parcel of an election.

It helps when parties and candidates are required to publish transparent financial accounts. But in an era where “dark money” can be more easily transferred across borders, it can be very hard to trace where donations really come from.

There are also solutions for many of the other problems, such as automatic voter registration, independence for electoral authorities, funding for electoral officials and electoral observation.

Democracy may need to be defended in battle, as we are currently seeing in Ukraine. But it also needs to be defended before it comes to all-out conflict, through discussion, protest, clicktivism and calls for electoral reforms.

Disclosure statement:

Toby James has previously received funding from the Canadian SSHRC, AHRC, ESRC, Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, Electoral Commission, Nuffield Foundation, and the McDougall Trust. His current research is funded by the Canadian SSHRC and ESRC.

Holly Ann Garnett receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Defence Academy Research Programme. She has previously received funding from: the British Academy, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the NATO Public Diplomacy Division, the American Political Science Association Centennial Centre, and the Conference of Defence Associations.

Spotlight: Hungary's April 2022 Elections

Amid a backdrop of international uncertainty in Eastern Europe, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán heads into the April 2022 parliamentary elections facing a unified opposition, his party’s first unified opposition since 2014.

Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister since 2010 (and also 1998-2002), faces increasing pressure domestically and internationally, as opposing parties and members of the international community alike criticize his policy stances, including LGBT issues, election laws, and immigration. Orbán and his Fidesz party, in a nominal coalition with the Christian Democratic People’s Party, have dominated Hungarian Parliament since the 2010 elections, when they took a 2/3rds majority, and subsequently passed a new constitution which curbed judicial independence, voting rights, religious freedoms, and more. Since then, Orbán has maintained his grip on power, winning elections by large margins in 2014 and 2018, and passing measures to cement himself in power. But such measures haven’t been as successful as they seemed: in 2019 local elections, opposition parties gained control of 11 cities, including Budapest, up from 3 in the election cycle prior, leveraging scandals against Fidesz party candidates and incumbents towards the end of the campaign cycle, undermining Fidesz’ typically rigid messaging, and frequently choosing to unify their opposition into support for one candidate. In next month’s parliamentary election, with a unified opposition galvanized by the momentum of the 2019 elections, polls show that Fidesz might be facing their most competitive national election in more than a decade.

Heading into the 2022 election, the opposition parties seem intent to remember the lessons from three years prior. 6 opposition parties formed a coalition, United for Hungary, selecting one candidate to lead them into the parliamentary election. After a competitive two round primary, Peter Marki-Zay, an independent and conservative who previously spent time living in the United States and Canada, narrowly defeated Klara Dobrev, a social democrat. Marki-Zay, mayor of the city of Hodmezovasarhely, has emphasized a foreign policy and governing philosophy that is diametrically opposed to Orbán’s, moving towards the West and “Western values,” while simultaneously criticizing Orbán’s growing ties with global autocracies like Russia and China. Lacking previous ties to Hungarian political parties, he has attacked Orbán and Fidesz from the right, accusing the government of not representing true conservative or Christian values.

The opposition’s efforts to remain a unified front have not been ineffective. Polling data dating back to December 2020 has shown that United for Hungary has stayed close to Fidesz, including, at several points in early 2021, taking the lead. As of February 16, 2022, Fidesz held just a 4% lead over the coalition, with no other opposition parties garnering over 5% support. But close polls don’t necessarily portend close elections, especially considering the electoral reforms of the government. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), responding to these moves, have called for a “full-scale international election observation mission” for the 2022 elections. A rarity for European Union members, the full-scale mission was recommended after the ODIHR issued a report in the runup to this year’s election, and more than sixty members of European Parliament from five parties and nineteen countries called for one, after a 2018 limited mission found faults with how that election had been run, and after the ODIHR met with individuals in Hungary.

The Hungarian government under Orbán has taken significant steps towards cementing their control and opposing Christian liberal democracy models that are commonplace in Western Europe. The government has supported legislation which would effectively force opposition parties to run on a single ballot line, curbed freedoms of the press, taken a publicly hard-line stance against immigration, and has openly promoted the establishment of a Christian illiberal democracy. Accusing Western European political elites of wanting to move into a “post-Christian era,” and arguing that liberal democracy is narrow-minded when it comes to opposing political views, Orbán’s rhetoric has remained staunchly populistic and nationalistic, and often, his policies have mimicked that.

Even at the ballot box, as Hungarians go to the polls to elect their Members of Parliament, Orbán’s purported Christian conservatism is evident. As voters cast ballots for their elected officials, voters will decide on a “child protection” referendum, which is modeled off Russian laws prohibiting “‘gay propaganda’ among minors,” and limits sex education. Even before the referendum has passed, Hungarian courts found that publications comparing an LGBT association to pedophiles are acceptable, basing their ruling partly off of Orbán’s rhetoric. Although some data suggests that Orbán’s populist attempts to play to homophobia to fire up his base is failing amid drops in Hungarian homophobia, he has doubled down, hoping such rhetoric might have similar effects to his anti-immigrant rhetoric in years passed.

Yet, even if the opposition coalition fails to win a majority or plurality, they appear poised to deal a significant blow to Orbán’s designs. Much of the government’s efforts to shift the direction of the nation has been built on the back of their parliamentary supermajority, holding more than 2/3rds of the seats since it first took power in 2010. Short of taking power, United for Hungary stands to make gains across the country, potentially bringing the government coalition to below 2/3rds of the seats, making it harder for the government coalition to pass legislation, though not enough to undo some of the harm brought by Fidesz’ years in power. The coalition has remained well-unified during the campaign, but following the election, it remains to be seen whether the parties can transcend ideological boundaries and maintain an effective government or opposition coalition in parliament.

Hungary stands at the intersection of a plethora of hot-button issues. Amid the Orbán government’s strengthening ties with Russia, Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine has created millions of refugees, some of whom have crossed the Hungarian border, as Orbán shifts his anti-immigrant rhetoric, to an extent. Orbán has spent time in the wake of the Russian invasion working to maintain the delicate balance between supporting Russia to the betterment of the Hungarian people, through such means as negotiating better gas prices, and maintaining their criticism of the invasion of Ukraine. The government also faces pushback from the West, particularly the European Union, putting further pressure on the nation as they face potential decisions about their future. Even amidst the turmoil, a unified opposition heading into the April 2022 parliamentary election shows that the Orbán government is vulnerable. Moving forward, even after the election reveals the strength of Fidesz and United for Hungary, questions remain over the size of the majority Fidesz can garner, and whether the coalition can remain a cogent block beyond this campaign.

Nick Lieggi is a sophomore at Emory University, majoring in political science and history, and enjoys spending his time writing and studying electoral systems across the globe.