Should people be allowed to question elections?

In 2015, the then President of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan, handed over power to Muhammadu Buhari after Buhari won a tense election. As we watched the news together in New York, a puzzled Nigerian friend asked me, “How do you get Prime Ministers in your country to vacate office after losing an election?”

That question had context. Buhari had just become the first Opposition politician ever to win power in Nigeria through an election. Since 1999, Jonathan’s party had ruled virtually unquestioned. Buhari himself had previously become President only through a violent coup in 1983. That had followed an earlier coup in 1975 against yet another military general.

Election results are often questioned by losing candidates across much of Africa, leading to coup attempts and frequent violence. That might all sound terribly inconvenient. You might even say that doubts over elections should be taboo, and that if an economist writes a paper that deduces electoral manipulation, he should be fired and intelligence agents sent in to investigate.

Some countries like that approach. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un holds an election every few years. He wins 100 per cent of the votes. Voter turnout? 100 per cent. No one is allowed to question those polls and no one ever seems to lead a mass revolt in North Korea.

Yet, most countries struggle to replicate North Korea’s ‘stability’. When electoral processes aren’t transparent and publicly scrutinised, it allows politicians the opportunity not just to manipulate the results but also to misuse public doubts for malicious purposes.

This is a problem that’s beginning to afflict even very advanced democracies. This week, former US President Donald Trump faced charges in the state of Georgia for attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential elections.

Trump deserves to be prosecuted for his well-documented efforts to nullify those polls: the former President had tried to use fake electors to overturn the popular vote, bullied senior authorities to commit crimes, and instigated a riot at the Capitol in Washington DC.

But prosecuting him still doesn’t solve the bigger problem. For years, American academics and journalists have been documenting evidence of voter suppression, intimidation and gerrymandering on various fronts. What Trump did was to ride on the coattails of those pre-existing doubts to cast aspersions on the results and thus gather support to attempt to overturn an electoral defeat. Worse, even after his attempted coup failed, he continued to fuel the idea of a stolen election.

Ironically, Trump’s campaign of slander might have been defanged and possibly pre-empted if systemic attempts had been made in previous years to scrutinise and repair gaps in America’s electoral processes. Yet, as it stands, future shenanigans by disgruntled candidates remain highly possible.

Let me caveat all of this though: There is often a subtle but important difference between questioning electoral processes and attempting to overturn election results as a whole. The former is a long-term effort that forces institutional transparency, without calling for electoral results to be nullified a night after they’re out. The latter is an overnight coup attempt that causes festering mistrust and potential violence.

Scrutinising electoral processes is, in fact, a widely accepted practice in global affairs. In a bid to build democracy, the UN and its partner agencies routinely observe elections in several countries, documenting instances of malpractice and pushing for reform.

India’s Election Commission has itself been an election observer for decades — from Egypt to Venezuela, Cambodia and beyond. That was a result of India’s own transparency and honesty about its electoral processes. By opening itself up to scrutiny, India won credibility and influence in the global practice of elections. To keep that credibility going, India should be inviting more scrutiny into its electoral processes, not less.