How to assess “the will of the people” in a crooked election?
Kurt Bassuener March 5th, 2008
The Russian electoral process, and the Western reaction to it, made me reflect on a trope of election assessments.
You can see it in in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) post-election statement and much of the commentary throughout the media.
It’s the idea that an election result, even though the process leading to it is flawed, still represents the popular will (or words to that effect), or that candidate X would have won anyway, despite irregularities.
There is some mathematical basis for these statements. But when does one start measuring? If the proverbial deck is stacked in favor of a candidate well in advance of election day with media dominance, the power of the state apparat behind you (termed “administrative resources” in the post-Soviet space), electoral administration is slanted, etc. – i.e., there is no way the playing field is level – how can the people have made a free and informed choice in a democratic process? These statements therefore seem presumptuous to me.
On top of that, there is the seemingly irresistible imperative to ensure a crushing victory over the opponent. The Medvedev victory was bad enough, but there have been far worse examples in the former Soviet space. My own memory goes back to Aleksandr Lukashenko’s “beautiful and elegant” victory in September 2001, when he won by 75%, officially. He could have won a technically clean (though certainly not fair because of his state control) election by a reasonable margin, but he felt he just had to make it crushing. In the Russian presidential “election,” it was important to ensure turnout was high to connote legitimacy, despite the lack – by design – of any serious opposition.
The fact that long-term election observation of the type conducted by OSCE-ODIHR (in advance of fielding a far larger group of short-term observers for the actual election day) is more likely to expose the strings being pulled – slanted media environment, unfair campaign conditions, intimidation of state employees, students, etc. – is the main reason that Russia and its CIS partners are so in favor of changing election monitoring methodology and shifting toward strictly parachute short-term observation.
