Autocrats can stack election regulatory agencies with party loyalists to ensure control over election oversight. This can make it more difficult to tell if elections in a country are actually being conducted fairly.

Wesleyan University

Autocrats manipulate voting laws and the way that elections are run so that they can more easily beat their opponents and continue to rule.

Attacking Free and Fair Elections

Haggard, S. & Kaufman, R. R. (2020). Backsliding: Democratic regress in the contemporary world: Appendix. In S. Haggard & R.R. Kaufman, Backsliding: Democratic regress in the contemporary world. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Haggard & Kaufman (2020) - Appendix

In their attempt to consolidate legislative power, autocrats can change electoral laws so that they are conducive to building majorities. For example, in electoral systems that favor proportional representation (PR), captive legislatures can pass laws favoring larger parties. They can institute thresholds to limit which parties gain representation in the legislature, thus restricting the number of smaller parties and making it easier for the ruling party to maintain or gain a majority. They can also change an electoral system from being PR to being majoritarian, with single-member winner-take-all districts like in the United States. Autocrats can also gerrymander districts to their advantage.

Manipulating Electoral Laws to the Government’s Advantage

Controlling Oversight of Elections

In the event that a would-be autocrat loses an election, they can also sow doubt in election security as a last-ditch effort to keep power and deteriorate democracy further. A key example of this is former President Trump alleging that his opponent, current President Biden, did not win the 2020 election fairly. 85% of Trump voters now believe that Biden did not win fairly in 2020. Furthermore, Trump’s lies directly led to the attempted takeover of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. 

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