KCPAC 2020 ROK-USA Conference
4.15 General Election Analysis
Grand Hyatt Hotel, Seoul, South Korea
Welcome, and thank you. I trust you are all here to learn about how to rig an election.
There are many ways. To rig an election, ballots can be stuffed. Opposition figures can be arrested or disappeared. You can intimidate supporters of the opposition. When the ballots come in, you can forget how to count. Adding ballots here. Subtracting ballots there. You can buy your ballots. You can make the voting lines so long that people turn away. When you rig an election it becomes an act of theatre. A play at reality. You play a game with the lives of citizens. In such a case, elections are not a measure of how well you represent the people, but the mechanism by which corrupt leadership destroys society.
These methods are old school. Let me tell you where we are today. Technology has made us more democratic, but don’t get too excited. Because the corrupt keep up with technology and adapt fast. Some of us might have thought that the internet was a naturally democratizing force. That having mobile phones was. That having cameras on our phones was. That having social media platforms and interactive channels, and YouTubers was. And yes, these are ways of making our views count. And it’s true, technology is a potentially democratizing force, but not necessarily so. In fact, maybe it’s possible to say that technology is inherently totalitarian. That unless we bring it to heel, like a wild dog, it will turn master.
Nowadays there are savvy, subtle and invisible ways to ruin a country. What I’m talking about is how you can take down a country without firing a shot. Without bloodshed. Ironically, the power comes through its invisibility. Stealth makes this technology. To those of us living our lives busily day to day, we may not think of such things. It may sound like science fiction. The notion that foreign governments would try to usurp power, or undermine leadership, with “teenagers in dark basements on laptops” might seem laughable. To talk about bots, troll farms and hackers chipping away at democracy may sound conspiratorial. But it is not conspiracy. Russia, China and other countries use bots, troll farms and a range of algorithms to warp news stories, to create ersatz civil societies, manufacture a world that warps reality for consumers of social media, such that up is down. The following groups have shown this is happening. Look at the work of Bellingcat. Look at the work of Hamilton 2.0. Look at DigitalSherlocks. Look at the group Forensic Architecture which exposes Russia’s nefarious tricks in Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere.
Without the careful work of these technological sleuths, these big data detectives, we would probably have no idea. The backdoor thief could claim he was never there. But thanks to these groups, and others, we know.
So when we talk of election rigging, we are talking about theft. That’s why experts making assessment of election fraud in DR Congo said the election was stolen. The machines which arrived in DR Congo, from South Korea, were called cheating machines. Congolese folks were irate, rightly so, and directed their anger at the machines. 7000 of them were torched.
In South Korea, those putting these machines into employment are said to have used software and big data that seemed to have been test driven in other landscapes, “successfully.” Leading up to the April 15 2020 election, the private data of South Koreans data was provided to the Chinese company Tencent; and in turn this geographic and demographic information was used to model the fraud. Statisticians have tested the data set of information available about the election, and the findings triggered several indicators that fraud did take place. And many in South Korean media are just now beginning to talk about it. Some of the stories are as follows: votes from one district were found in another. More votes were cast than registered voters in South Korea. Vote counting machines were not supposed to be able to communicate with each other, or be USB accessible, but they were. Cameras were supposed to observe the machines, but none were present… and so on.
What happens when people fear that an election has been stolen? What does it do to a democracy to have an election rigged? It erodes trust in democratic processes. Media and politicians need to take the lead. As the “fifth estate” media need to check and investigate. International media need to monitor. Rights organizations need to inquire, and uncover what happened. Guilty parties need to be held to account, and trust in democratic processes restored.
Sandra Fahy, Ph.D. is a visiting fellow at the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School. She is an associate professor of anthropology at Sophia University in Tokyo Japan. She is the author of two books about human rights in North Korea which have been nominated for several awards. Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Rights Abuses on the Record (Columbia University Press 2019) and Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea (Columbia University Press 2015). She has also published policy articles related to internal migration and TB/ MDR TB in North Korea. Twitter @FahySandra Email: smfahy@gmail.com
