Why democracy hating autocrats love elections

In some parts of the world elections bring change through the ballot box, in others they are used to prevent change, A glut of elections to prompts an examination of why this is so

It’s a fair bet that the name Sam Hou-fai means nothing to you but he has just been installed to lead the Macau government following one of the lesser noticed elections in this record breaking year for elections around the world.

As many as 100 elections will have been held by the year end. Like many things in life they are not all equal and some are more unequal than others.

Mr Sam’s victory in the Macau election is a case in point as the sole candidate in a poll where a mere 394 votes were cast by a handpicked electorate chosen by Beijing officials.

The former Portuguese colony, the world’s gambling capital, also famous for money laundering with an added sprinkle of prostitution, benefits from the efficiency of Chinese style-elections where the outcome is a given, there is no need for much campaigning and the winning candidate is guaranteed to do what he is told.

You may ask : why bother with such flagrantly rigged elections in Macau and indeed in the bigger ex-colony of Hong Kong, where a more vigorous election system was demolished after voters stubbornly refused to endorse China’s favoured candidates?

China, which has no tradition of anything resembling free and fair elections, was nevertheless determined to preserve the façade of an election system and equally determined preserve the illusion of choice based on its dubious promises to allow the former colonies to conduct their affairs with greater autonomy.

What this means is holding elections in name only, a farce long since perfected in neighbouring North Korea where voting is compulsory, there is no pretence of choice and woe betide any Korean citizen brave enough to indicate that they do not support the chosen candidate.

Less draconian election systems that nevertheless deliver the required results for authoritarian regimes have also been much in evidence this year, notably in Russia where the regime detained opposition candidates and barred others from standing, mobilised the media to support Vladimir Putin and dispatched dissenting voices to jail.

Another favoured tactic of election suppression is to simply ignore the outcome. In Venezuela, for example, there was overwhelming evidence of victory for the opposition but the Maduro regime, with a vice-like grip on the counting made sure of an amenable result.

All this effort devoted to phony elections seems like a waste of time but it makes sense to regimes that crave legitimacy and believe that it can be delivered via the ballot box, presumably because this is how it works in countries where genuine elections are held.

The authoritarian governments want the legitimacy bestowed by elections but only as long as they can determine the outcomes. In so doing they inadvertently reveal their deepest insecurities. These regimes might even believe that they are genuinely popular yet dare not risk putting this to the test because somewhere in the deepest recesses of their minds lurks the realisation that they can only maintain control via terror and coercion.

Thus phony elections are widespread. Defenders of authoritarianism think that are on to something by pointing out flaws in what are generally regarded as free election systems.

They say, for example, that Britain’s constituency system is not democratic as it allows parties who have not secured a majority of the popular vote to win because it penalises smaller parties who have strong national support but patchy local support.

This argument is not without merit and is regularly aired in Britain where people are free to express their views. The same can be for America’s presidential election system that allows a candidate with a smaller share of the popular vote to win if a majority of Electoral College votes can be secured in a system that is supposedly fair to voters in smaller states who are given disproportionate influence.

In other words the criticism is that so called democracies are based on hypocrisy because they tolerate electoral systems that do not necessarily reflect majority views. It would be foolish to deny serious flaws in free election systems but very hard to believe that the flaws in democratic election systems makes it somehow alright to tolerate full scale rigging.

Rigging ensures victory for a non-entity like Mr Sam in Macau, a brutal dictator such as Vladimir Putin and a man like Nicolas Maduro who has managed to reduce once prosperous Venezuela to absolute penury.

By basing their legitimacy to rule on a process of rigged elections the riggers run the risk that the people they rule will start taking the business of elections seriously and demand the real thing.