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IF YOU CHEAT, CHEAT BIG
Carlos Lozada
The Wenatchee World Online
For The Washington Post
Posted July 04, 2009
Imagine you're an aspiring dictator looking to steal a national
election by stuffing ballot boxes or making sure that a batch of votes
- say, even in your opponent's hometown - simply disappears. Do you
engineer a victory by a razor-thin margin, 51 to 49 percent or so,
to make things look legit? Nope. If you're going to cheat, cheat big.
That's the lesson of a 2008 study by University of Chicago political
scientist Alberto Simpser, who examined dubious elections from 1990 to
2007. From Armenia and Belarus to Nigeria and Zimbabwe, Simpser found
that incumbents often aren't content to simply defeat their opponents
and hold on to power for one more term - they want to trounce them.
In "Cheating Big: On the Logic of Electoral Corruption in Developing
Countries," Simpser, a native of Mexico who grew up watching the
ruling PRI rack up big electoral victories, argues that large-scale
vote-rigging can yield big benefits beyond simple re-election. Massive
victories "can discourage opponents from joining or supporting
rival parties, from voting, or from participating in other ways,"
he writes. "It can motivate supporters as well."
The idea is to win not just the current election, but future ones
too. Even in elections in which incumbents held commanding pre-vote
leads, the compulsion to win overwhelmingly is common - especially
in "semi-democratic, semi-authoritarian" regimes, Simpser contends,
"where multiple parties contest elections regularly ... but where
the incumbent holds great advantages."
Which, come to think of it, sounds a little like Iran. So what does
Simpser make of the June 12 election in that country, where the
official announcement that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had defeated
Mir Hossein Mousavi by 63 to 33 percent sparked widespread protests
and a government crackdown? Without passing judgment on whether fraud
took place, Simpser thinks his logic holds up. "For a regime like
Iran's with internal divisions, a weak economy and foreign enemies,
a convincing victory would be very useful," he said.
Even Iran's supreme leader seemed to make that argument when he
spoke out in defense of the official results: "If the difference was
100,000 or 500,000 or 1 million, well, one may say fraud could have
happened. But how can one rig 11 million votes?"
Carlos Lozada
The Wenatchee World Online
For The Washington Post
Posted July 04, 2009
Imagine you're an aspiring dictator looking to steal a national
election by stuffing ballot boxes or making sure that a batch of votes
- say, even in your opponent's hometown - simply disappears. Do you
engineer a victory by a razor-thin margin, 51 to 49 percent or so,
to make things look legit? Nope. If you're going to cheat, cheat big.
That's the lesson of a 2008 study by University of Chicago political
scientist Alberto Simpser, who examined dubious elections from 1990 to
2007. From Armenia and Belarus to Nigeria and Zimbabwe, Simpser found
that incumbents often aren't content to simply defeat their opponents
and hold on to power for one more term - they want to trounce them.
In "Cheating Big: On the Logic of Electoral Corruption in Developing
Countries," Simpser, a native of Mexico who grew up watching the
ruling PRI rack up big electoral victories, argues that large-scale
vote-rigging can yield big benefits beyond simple re-election. Massive
victories "can discourage opponents from joining or supporting
rival parties, from voting, or from participating in other ways,"
he writes. "It can motivate supporters as well."
The idea is to win not just the current election, but future ones
too. Even in elections in which incumbents held commanding pre-vote
leads, the compulsion to win overwhelmingly is common - especially
in "semi-democratic, semi-authoritarian" regimes, Simpser contends,
"where multiple parties contest elections regularly ... but where
the incumbent holds great advantages."
Which, come to think of it, sounds a little like Iran. So what does
Simpser make of the June 12 election in that country, where the
official announcement that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had defeated
Mir Hossein Mousavi by 63 to 33 percent sparked widespread protests
and a government crackdown? Without passing judgment on whether fraud
took place, Simpser thinks his logic holds up. "For a regime like
Iran's with internal divisions, a weak economy and foreign enemies,
a convincing victory would be very useful," he said.
Even Iran's supreme leader seemed to make that argument when he
spoke out in defense of the official results: "If the difference was
100,000 or 500,000 or 1 million, well, one may say fraud could have
happened. But how can one rig 11 million votes?"