Safeguarding Elections in Africa

             Elections are the mechanism by which the people most regularly and effectively express their political will.  There are demonstration, boycotts, recalls, impeachments and even popularly supported coups, but elections are the most legal and orderly way for citizens to respect their constitutions and choose to change government officials who they don’t believe are serving their interests or maintain those they feel do fulfill their wants and needs.

            As of this writing, in 2022 there are eight African elections scheduled: Mali (February), Somalia (February), Guinea (March), Senegal (July), Angola (August), Kenya (August), Somaliland (November) and Sudan (December).  Important elections are scheduled to be held next year in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, Libya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Zimbabwe.  I use the necessary qualifier scheduled because elections get postponed all the time.

            Given the importance of the elections process and its three stages – pre-election, election and post-election – it is vital to understand the necessities for transparent, effective election management.  Elections have been most often stolen in the pre-election phase.  It is how an election is set up that determines the real potential for competition.  Intimidation and efforts to buy votes have of course been a staple of election manipulation before and during the election process, but in recent decades, manipulating post-election  ballot counting has been an increasing tactic of those in power who cannot accept losing.

Pre-Election

In between elections, governments are supposed to manage the voter rolls to ensure that they are up-to-date, purging all those who moved or are deceased.  If you don’t, that’s how unscrupulous governments “vote” for people who no longer live in that voting district or live at all.  Registration of voters also can be a problem.  Since many people live in rural areas with poor transportation, there always is a risk that too many people won’t be able to register to vote

That was the concern in the lead-up to the 1992 Angolan general elections.  As the Angola government had insufficient aircraft to reach potential voters in rural areas, the South African Air Force supplied helicopters and fixed-wing planes (with crews) to transport electoral officials and UN observers. The South Africans extended this aid because they had been involved in the Angolan conflict for many years and wanted to bring it to an end with that election.  When the process was completed, on 10 August, after the original deadline had been extended, some 4.8 million persons, or an estimated 92% of the eligible voters, had been registered.  Unfortunately, such foreign assistance isn’t always available.  It is the responsibility of interested voters to make sure their names are on the voting rolls before the elections to the best of their abilities.

Registration also extends to political parties and candidates.  There have been cases in which a candidate’s citizenship was questioned and used to deny registration.  Before the 1995 elections in Cote d’Ivoire, the legislature approved an electoral code that barred candidates if either of their parents were of a foreign nationality and if they had not lived in Côte d'Ivoire for the preceding five years. It was widely thought these provisions were aimed at Alassane Ouattara, whose father’s family was from Burkina Faso and who had lived in Washington while working at the World Bank.  He was barred from the 2000 election when a new law barred candidates unless both parents were born in the country.  He eventually was allowed to stand for elections and won in 2010. 

As for registration of candidates and parties, irregularities sometimes are the result of intra-party wrangling where a potentially successful candidate is prevented from winning a nomination, but governments also use bureaucracies to prevent candidates from registering or running.  Sometimes, this includes bringing court cases against a candidate as the Government of Liberia has done recently to Alex Cummings of the Alternative National Congress.  Governments have denied registration for parties in various countries because they are religiously based or ethnically based.

An important potential problem is in the delimitation of constituencies.  Back in the 1990s, the Kenyan government at the time, through its election commission, manipulated the drawing of constituencies so that there were more, smaller ones for the ruling party and fewer, larger ones for areas where opposition parties were more popular.  Consequently, you started out with an uneven environment in which the ruling party had more chances to gain seats than the opposition.  So, when voting began, they didn’t have to do much to affect voting on their behalf (although most still do anyway).  The playing ground was already tilted in the favor of the ruling party.

Election Day(s)

            Given the pre-election shenanigans in which governments and ruling parties engage, the old way of manipulating elections isn’t as necessary.  Still, some in power don’t want to win small so they make every effort to push for dominance on election day.  Unfortunately, this effort is often abetted by observers – domestic and foreign.

            It used to be that you saw election day violence and intimidation be rampant when voters were voting or on the way to vote.  It still does happen, if not as openly or as often.  Most voters are women, so violence and intimidation are effective since many of them have children with them and wisely avoid danger for themselves and their offspring.  However, the violence is often not at the polling place, but rather on the paths to it, especially in rural areas where voters must pass through lightly populated sections.

            Such unseen intimidation wouldn’t be seen by lax observers, especially foreign observers who seldom make a real effort to investigate situations surrounding voting.  I recall hearing a Japanese delegation’s post-election report in Kenya in 1992: “The day was nice, people in line were happy and voting went well.”  If voters were scared even to approach the polling place, this delegation wouldn’t have known it.

            Some intimidation happens in plan sight.  In many places, men are allowed to tell their wives and voting-age children who to vote for, and unless voting is private and carefully monitored, voters can be bullied into voting in ways they would not otherwise.  These husbands and fathers already laid down the law on who to vote for and don’t have to show any bullying on site, but if wives, daughters and sons can vote without them seeing who they voted for, then they can vote as they want and pretend to have done as ordered.  That’s how surprise results sometimes happen.

In the 1992 Equatorial Guinea elections, some polling places were insecure to say the least, with voters sent to rooms open to the outside, where they were vulnerable to intimidation.  In other situations, blind or otherwise handicapped voters require assistance to vote, and it is better to have presumably neutral polling officials help them than family or local leaders who might want to cast their vote for them as they choose.           

            There are other tactics used to manipulate the vote as well.  There often are provisions allowing for non-residents to vote in a polling place, e.g., police or soldiers serving as security and polling officials.  While justifiable, one must be careful to ensure that the numbers of exempted voters isn’t unreasonably high.  Other tactics include the manipulation of voting totals being reported.  For example, if numbers are transposed – say submitting 605 votes for 506 – a constituency outcome can subtly be changed if observers aren’t careful, and a party can officially lose a contest it actually won.

Now you might wonder how such a thing could happen if the poll watchers are vigilant.  Unfortunately, I’ve seen untrained poll watchers who aren’t familiar with the rules see the vote going on without actually knowing what they’re watching.  That’s a worse situation than an election not being watched at all because it gives the impression that all was well when it wasn’t.  I recall situations in which I trained election observers in cases where plastic ties were used to seal election boxes.  Some poll watchers told me they objected and called for metal locks.  What I had to explain to them was that the plastic seals used would show signs of tampering whereas metal locks could be opened and re-closed without evidence.

Not only must poll watchers be vigilant and knowledgeable, but they must be present during voting.  Some polling officials will deny them entry for one reason or another, so paperwork must be in order, and poll watchers must know the election law regarding observers to defend themselves.  They also must carefully watch whether voters are being denied the right to vote because polling officials say they aren’t registered.  Voter ID cards and registers must be checked, and complaints must be filed in a timely manner with as much detail as possible.  To accomplish all this, poll watchers must make the commitment to bring food ad drink with them so they don’t have to wander off to find it, leaving polling places unattended, during which time irregularities could occur.

Finally, the listing of polling places must be accurate lest it lead to confusion and inaccurate voting tallies.  When I was part of the UN team observing the 1994 elections in South Africa, there were last-minute changes that caused duplications in the numbers on polling places.  I recall being at one polling place given a name and number and looking down the road at another with the same name and number.  In that case, most people wanted the majority-rule elections to happen on time, so there were few complaints about irregularities so long as the black majority gained control of government.

Post-election

            The 2005 elections in Ethiopia set a standard for blatant vote manipulation.  The final tally was postponed by months, leading to two demonstrations in which protesters were killed by government forces.  When I accompanied a Congressional delegation in August of that year, months after the voting had taken place and preliminary results showing the opposition had done much better than anticipated, we found that the election tribunals consisted of the government election commission, the ruling party and the complaining party.  Obviously, the two-to-one nature of the vote denied any real chance of overturning questionable vote results.  In very few cases, the opposition  party prevailed.  But even when proper courts took up election cases, their verdicts often were so slow in being taken up or in seeing rulings that the “winning” party had a lot of time to exercise power.

            A year after the 2019 elections in Nigeria, courts were still hearing election challenges.  In Bayelsa State, the candidate of the All-Progressives Congress was initially thought to have won the election, but 24 hours before his swearing-in ceremony, the Supreme Court ruled that because his running mate had presented fake documents. he was therefore disqualified. You couldn’t be a candidate for governor without a qualified running mate.

            And that wasn’t the only case of an overturned election result in Nigeria following the 2019 balloting.  The Nigerian election commission announced that it had withdrawn 64 certificates of return – documents issued to election winners – and reissued them to people declared winners by courts of law following the 2019 general elections.  Whether these were the correct results or not, having commissions or courts decide elections in the aftermath of voting undermines citizen confidence in the democratic process.

            In past African elections, there was shooting at the counting stations, lights were turned out and observers of the counting were either prevented from having an up-close view of the ballot counting or not allowed to watch at all.  This all casts doubts on whether the counting process is honest.

            I recall being asked by impatient journalists whether the 1992 elections were “free and fair.”  The answer is much more complex than yes or no, but reporters had no patience for anything other than what they would consider to be a straight answer.  They considered any nuanced answer to be waffling or defending a crooked election.  It just isn’t that simple, as I’ve outlined here.

            To guarantee a free, fair and transparent election, the process must be followed from start to finish, and corrections must be sought at each stage.  Safeguarding elections is a constant effort. Some forms of manipulation guarantee a skewed result.  Others can see a potentially satisfactory outcome slip away in the process.  Once an election goes wrong, there is little that can be done other than to redo the election, but if the process is flawed, the result still won’t necessarily reflect the will of the people, and that is the point of having elections.

            For elections to work, governments must facilitate a level playing field for all candidates, observers must know their job and do it to the best of their ability, think tanks should watch the process all the way with an informed eye and call out any fouls along the way so informed protests can be put forward, voters must ensure that they are registered and persevere in voting despite all but violent attempts to stop them from casting their ballots and international observers and governments must be honest about elections processes in advance of voting and use whatever pressure they can bring to bear to correct problems before they occur. 

Elections cost a lot of money and call for the marshalling of significant human resources.  It is better to prevent a stolen election before it happens than to try to correct one after the fact.