The Evolution Of Election Rigging

By Raisa Wickrematunge

In 1998, journalist Eduardo Galeano wrote, “The upside-down world rewards in reverse: it scorns honesty, punishes work, prizes lack of scruples… injustice, they say, is a law of nature.” Galeano may have been born in Uruguay, but his words have a disturbing ring of truth to them.

Sri Lanka is poised on the brink of  presidential and general elections. These elections promise to be full of fire and brimstone, with two former friends now foes. Will the fireworks be restricted to political rhetoric? A cursory glance at previous elections reveals that the electoral process is rarely completely free and fair. Violations of election misconduct abound, whether it be misuse of state resources or violent attacks.

Election rigging is now the norm

Indeed, allegations of election rigging are far from uncommon. In October 2000, Elections Commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake announced that complaints of rigging were reported from four districts, especially in Kandy. The UNP cried foul in the 1999 Central Provincial elections.

In fact, to look at reports of rigging one need look no further than the 2008 Eastern Province provincial election. There were reports of rigging and voter intimidation, escalating to pure violence. Government members were primarily implicated in many of the incidents. The media witnessed about 30 UPFA supporters shove queuing voters away and forming a fresh queue. They then stuffed ballot boxes. Police officials were unable to control the chaos. UNP General Secretary Tissa Attanayake claimed UNP polling agents had been assaulted and chased away from polling stations in Batticaloa, Trincomalee and Ampara. Ballot box stuffing was also widespread across the Eastern Province, it was alleged. What’s more, there were reports that would-be voters had been assaulted: by ministers, hired goons, even rival party supporters. Each party implicated the other in these attacks.

These are just a few instances where election rigging has been alleged. But few speak of the actual methods used by unscrupulous people to scramble to positions of power.
Spokesman for Campaign for Free and Fair Elections (CaFFE) Keerthi Tennekone said rigging did not just amount to ballot stuffing. In fact, he said there were a variety of ways to rig an election. One common grassroots method of rigging is done by Grama Niladharis and other government servants who “pump” certain people, such as Samurdhi beneficiaries, to vote a certain way. In addition when it came to the voter registration stage, it is possible for Grama Niladharis to delete certain voters’ names and add others instead. The voters would only realise this when their polling cards failed to arrive.

Tennekone revealed that at least 133,000 polling cards were issued to 53,000 people in the Colombo District alone during the last Western Provincial Council election.
In addition, voters capitalized on the sluggish system, using polling cards issued to people who were overseas or who had died recently. However with the rule that ID cards must be produced to vote, this practice has become less common, Tennekone said.

Another less common practice is voter by chain, which is when a voter takes a ballot paper out of the booth, marked with a candidate, and passes it to another voter, and so on. With election monitors in place this too has become less common. Another issue was voters being detained at cluster polling stations in the north and east during the war. LTTE cadres would detain would-be voters and send others in their place. In some places it was the STF who detained voters, a scheme which was the brainchild of former Defence Minister Anuruddha Ratwatte in the 1999 Eastern Provincial Council elections, Tennekone charged.

Temporary ID cards are not the solution

Yet the issue which most worried Tennekone was the issue of temporary ID cards. “As of 2008, 12% of the voters didn’t have an ID card number against their names. Although this doesn’t mean all of them don’t have ID cards, this is still worrying,” Tennekone said. He spoke of the misuse of these temporary cards at the last Eastern Provincial Council elections, with signed temporary cards handed over to youths as young as 14 and 15 just outside the polling stations. As such, he said either permanent cards should be made available or the cards should be issued solely through the Elections Commissioner so that similar misuse wouldn’t take place in the upcoming elections. In fact UNF candidate Sarath Fonseka has gone on record predicting that the temporary cards will be misused in the upcoming presidential election.

How much do these actions affect the final vote? Tennekone said for a presidential election as little as 2% could be decisive. He said theoretically, these methods could be used in order to make such a shift possible.

UNP MP Ravi Karunanayake said there were three areas where rigging was prevalent. One area was simply depriving people of the right to vote, by intimidating or even assaulting them. Another was voting on behalf of another person, though this became less widespread after the ID card system was introduced. Karunanayake surmised that undue pressure could affect anything from 2 to 4% of the vote. In addition, Karunanayake pointed out the possibility that the ballot boxes could be switched while being moved, or be otherwise tampered with. He said though the possibility of this was remote, there had been suspicions on this score, particularly while votes were being counted in the computer room.

He spoke of controversial SPC member Nishantha Muthuhettigama’s assertion that he had received around 125,000 preferential votes rather than the approximately 75,000 votes announced by the Elections Department. Karunanayake said a government desperate to see the downfall of the common candidate might well resort to using such methods to retain power.

Rigging has evolved

SLFP Mahajana Wing Leader Mangala Samaraweera said the oldest method seemed to be voter impersonation, though this had been reduced with the introduction of the National ID. He added that election agents could be chased away from the polling booths so that ballot stuffing could commence. Though there are many recorded incidents of this nature, Samaraweera contended that this method is no longer as easy as it was.

Samaraweera said rigging had become “far more advanced and sophisticated,” with the systematic removal of various people from the voter’s list. Either the Grama Sevaka or another election official could remove certain names, effectively crippling their voting rights, Samaraweera claimed. He said each party should coordinate with their own election agents to see that this did not happen. He also spoke of manipulation of the votes at the final counting stages, adding that many such complaints had been received from various candidates. However he said there was little evidence to support this theory. In addition Samaraweera spoke of widespread physical and psychological assault on people to prevent them from voting, an act which could indirectly affect the final result.

It appears that the electoral process is riddled with intimidation, violence and corruption, and election related misconduct has become the norm. It seems that not much is being done to prevent it. In fact, the system seems to have evolved, as Samaraweera notes, to become more “sophisticated.” The irony is that sophisticated methods are used for uncivilized ends, with little ramifications for the culprits. As Galeano would say — what an upside-down world.