Episode 20: How to hold an election
What's Wrong with Democracy?
In the series finale of 'What's Wrong with Democracy?', Ben Ansell explores the fundamental mechanics and vulnerabilities of the electoral process.
Key takeaways
- Robin Forestier-Walker details how Bidzina Ivanishvili uses wealth and 'isolationist populism' to influence Georgia's political landscape.
- The 'freedom tool' utilizes blockchain technology to provide anonymous, tamper-proof voting options for Georgian opposition supporters.
Main topics
- Georgian electoral threats
- Blockchain in voting technology
Notable quotes
Elections are the bedrock of democracies, but just having elections does not a democracy make.
Conclusion
Maintaining a healthy democracy requires more than just polling statio
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:04) Tortoise. Speaker 5 (0:08) I'm Ben Ansell and welcome to the very last episode of What's Wrong With Democracy from Tortoise and supported by the Open Society Foundations. Now, over the course of this series, we've taken a long, hard look at the body politic that is democracy and we've tried to get to the bottom of its ailments to diagnose its symptoms and offer up possible cures. Now, at the start of this year, there was a lot of talk about democracy teetering on the edge of ruin. Elections in dozens of countries have been marred with disinformation, distrust, even violence. That's true. But still, voters have turned up to the polls in their billions. And what's more, strongman leaders haven't had things their own way entirely. We've seen elections go in surprising directions, including in the world's largest democracy, India. Speaker 5 (1:04) So this week, our final week, it seems fitting to get back to the basics, to think about the very process that allows democracies to come into being and regenerate. And that is, of course, elections. Tanya Holstein from the Westminster Foundation for Democracy is going to be joining me later to discuss the role of election observers and how we can tell if an election is in fact free and fair. After that. Pippa Norris from the Harvard Kennedy School is here to talk about how the US fell out of love with its electoral system and what we can do to fix it. But my first guest is here to talk about an upcoming election that could represent an existential threat to democracy in that country where both sides are fighting for the very future of the country's identity. Speaker 5 (1:57) Robin Forestier-Walker, he's a freelance journalist based there in the capital, to Blasey and he's going to be talking to me about the upcoming Georgian election. So Robin, let me begin by asking you what Georgian politics look like now as compared to when you arrived over a decade ago. Because I think anyone who's been reading the international news about Georgia, they'll have the sense that things have become a lot more contentious. So, is that accurate? I Speaker 4 (2:24) would say for sure things have become very contentious here and this is probably the most eagerly anticipated election since I arrived. When I first got here the governing party had just come to power. Back then they were more of a coalition of social liberals and moderate conservatives and they have transformed over the past decade into something far more akin to a a single party controlled by a very rich wealthy businessman who founded what it's known as the Georgian Dream. When I first arrived back in 2012 they had just come to power and they had won in a landslide election and there was a lot of hope for change and there were substantial developments in the country in particular Georgia's orientation towards the European Union, NATO membership and so on, which is really important for Georgians because around 80 % of Georgians say they want to be part of Europe and they also, many of them, want to be part of NATO because they see themselves as facing an existential threat from Russia and have done for many years, especially in the light of what's been happening in Ukraine since the invasion, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. February 2022. This wealthy businessman that I mentioned, his name is Bidzina Ivanishvili and Georgian politics cannot really be fully understood without understanding his outside role. He's a man who made his money in 90s Russia. He understands the way the political system works, the way Russia works. So he obviously also was a very skillful businessman and mover and shaker and operator. And he made his appearance on the political scene in Georgia towards the end of the previous government, which was considered very pro-Western, very liberal oriented. But he'd had enough of that. And so had many Georgians, because it itself had grown authoritarian. So they come to power, the sweeping change. He becomes prime minister for a year, drops out afterwards and says, I'm not going to be in politics anymore. I did what I wanted to achieve. I created a new party. Here you go, Georgia. It's all yours. But then as we've seen over the years, this party seems to be very much all about propping up his business interests and furthering his wealth. And therefore, the people who work for him and under him in this party and in the bureaucracy, they all have lots now to lose because they've enjoyed his patronage. And he also came out. earlier this year when there were mass anti-government protests about a Russian law that was being introduced. And we can talk about that in a minute. And made this alarming speech to thousands of his supporters that had been bussed in from around the country, the kind of resources that he has and his party has to bring people in. And started talking about things like a global party of war. This is a conspiracy theory. that began in Georgia that is very much a homegrown Georgian conspiracy theory that basically we don't know who this global party of war is but it's essentially the West, the liberal governments of the West and the media are all part of this conspiracy to take down Georgia. They have their agents on the ground here and what they want to do is drag Georgia into Russia's war. against Ukraine, without saying that it's Russia really that's the warmonger, but somehow implying that the West is only interested in bringing Georgia, embroiling Georgia in a wider conflict. And therefore, the big argument that they're making this election is, vote for us and we will stay peaceful, vote for anyone in the opposition, and the country is going to end up like Ukraine. Speaker 5 (6:22) So it's a kind of isolationist populism with winks and nods towards Russia without. ever quite saying it. So these elections are coming up. How confident are Georgians that those elections are going to be free and fair? Not least given that some of the monitoring organisations like Transparency International have felt themselves to be essentially, that they've opted to leave. I guess they've been chilled by some of this, you know, anti-foreign agent rhetoric and policymaking. Speaker 4 (6:51) So these local observation missions obviously play a critical role. And I think for transparency, as you mentioned, it's going to be difficult. There's also ISFID, which is another one which has played a really, really critical role in observing previous elections. And I've seen some citizen-led movements now, which are quite interesting, where I have a friend of mine who's a volunteer and they've been training him up as an election monitor and thousands like him. So Georgian citizens will be attempting to monitor these elections. But we've seen in the past how it's been an uneven playing field and the government has been able to get the results that it's wanted. In the previous election back in 2020, we saw a result that gave them their majority again and where the opposition didn't perform as well as they should have done. But in a way, what we could say perhaps is that the government is in a position to massage the result. And perhaps by a few percent, perhaps by as much as 10 percent, who knows? So it could be that what we end up seeing again is a is a manipulated result, not necessarily through things like ballot box stuffing or what's called carousel voting, when the same groups of people go to different polling stations and are somehow able to register to vote again, but also through the the media environment, the the Speaker 5 (8:19) control of institutions. So we're sort of teetering on the edge of effective strongman politics. I wanted to ask you, you've spoken to some people sort of broadly connected to the opposition movement in the technology industry or who are connected to technologies that might be used by the opposition to try and secure the vote. So let's have a look at that. There Speaker 4 (8:42) is this idea that you could... you could they call it liquid democracy this is their their terming and it's a ukrainian georgian group of of of coders and and you know tech geeks who who've come up with a tool they call it the freedom tool and it basically uses blockchain to anonymize voting but also um enable surveillance-free, tamper-proof polling. So basically, it's a form of cryptography involving blockchain that will enable people to vote anonymously and safely, but also not to be able to vote twice, for instance. The trick is you need three things. You need the security of anonymity when you're voting, but you also need to somehow be a viable voter or have authenticity. So they reckon they've cracked this sort of golden... triptych of problems that hadn't until now been solved. And so in theory, anyone can hold a vote, provided they have a sort of an ID. You just scan your passport and you verify yourself and then you vote and that's it done. And no one knows it was you, but the vote is secure and genuine. Speaker 4 (9:59) And that's how the blockchain technology works, because it basically registers these votes and allows them to be anonymized. Speaker 5 (10:06) Now, the idea of doing this then would be so that opposition voters could essentially kind of record how they had voted in case there's nudging and electoral manipulation, because presumably the government aren't going to buy into this right away for the elections coming up in a few weeks. So Robin, could we conclude by just talking about the future of Georgian democracy? So what do you think the prospects are for Georgian democracy in this polarised situation? I Speaker 4 (10:33) think if you look at the soul of Georgian Dream, what you end up seeing is not an ideologically driven... movement, you just see it as representing business interests. They're good and friendly for big business. How can they stay in power? Well, they just changed their ideological mask. They have literally gone from we're pro-European, we're liberal to actually We stand for traditional Georgia, a country that has existed, a state that has existed for hundreds of years, thousands of years even. We are one of the first Christian nations. And we understand that this current pseudo-liberal trend towards recognizing the rights of gay people and abortion and all of these things are just not who we are. And therefore, we are appealing now to Georgians, real traditional... Speaker 4 (11:29) patriotic Georgians. So this is where it maps onto this idea as well about foreign ideas, foreignness coming in and fundamentally screwing