Machiavelli's Machine:
A Canadian rationalization of the endemic nature of electoral fraud

By Christian Leuprecht and Chris McCreery            

Abstract

Conceived long before the events that embroiled the recent U.S. presidential election, the paper is intended to draw attention to the evolving practices of electoral manipulation.  From a historical and contemporary perspective on the Canadian situation, the authors argue that electoral manipulation is endemic to modern democracy.

Elite theorist Joseph Schumpeter rationalized democracy as method.[1] Regular elections are the means to that end.  They are supposed to check the potential for olicharchal tyranny by facilitate competition among elites.  In order for this idea to work, however, democratic citizens are assumed to choose rationally.  So, elections are about Letting the people decide.[2]  The ambiguous title of the 1988 Canadian federal election study hints at the contradiction inherent in electoral decisions: letting the people make a rational choice.  Or are elections really about rationalizing the electoral process in a manner that turns an apparently rational choice into a ratification.  Are voters independent actors, or are the masses at the mercy of a manipulative electoral machine?  Machiavellian realism gives credence to the machine notion.  Complemented by Max Weber's assertion that power is endemic to politics, the logical inference to draw is that winning elections and/or referenda is key to retaining power in modern democracies.  Manipulation of the electoral machine is thus inextricably linked with power politics.

If that premise is correct, then the study of electoral irregularities will always be a part of the study of politics; henceforth, as political conflict is increasingly resolved by popular consultation, the theme of electoral manipulation should logically gain in prominence.  In reality, however, the opposite seems to be the case.  The hypothetical explanation we advance in our paper is an ominous shift from the retail-level manipulation of individual voters to wholesale manipulation of entire regions.  Driving this shift is a propensity to minimize the impact of voter choice on the actual result.  We argue that as a result, it has become increasingly difficult to differentiate manipulation from corruption.

            A successful study now hinges exclusively on demarcating acceptable strategy and potential irregularity.  That requires a standard: Manipulation is corrupted when it is deliberately used to skew not just any vote, but a vote that is "too close to call."  Such circumstances are particularly amenable to fraudulent practices.  But if we can show that the propensity has indeed been to minimize the impact of the individual voter's choice on the actual outcome, then these practices are no longer to be sought in the mundane casting of votes.  Instead, we need to focus on the dynamics of the election.  We test this hypothesis with data from Canadian federal elections (1891, 1904, 1917, 1953), provincial elections in Quebec (1944, 1952, 1956, 1998) and referenda (Newfoundland in 1948 and Quebec in 1995).

1. Truth and Method

The systematic study of election fraud is invariably confronted by a methodological challenge.  For the electorate to be left with an aura of legitimacy, irregularities have to look regular which means disposing of the tangible evidence: "Successful dirty politics, by definition, is never discovered."[3]  The common assumption, therefore, is that electoral fraud is virtually impossible to prove empirically:

The nature of the subject matter, of course, like other illegal, immoral, or irregular activities, makes it unlikely that conclusive documentary evidence of fraud will be found.  Few individuals were likely to have recorded for posterity their involvement in such acts.[4]

This is not entirely so.  When more votes are cast than are registered on the voters' list, that is empirical evidence.[5]  When people who have been dead for years somehow still make it onto the list and rise from the dead to cast their ballot that is empirical evidence.[6]   By contrast, voter turnout is not: Philip Converse's thesis that flagrant crimes at the ballot box increase the vote polled and thus inflate turnout is incorrect:[7] "Much substantiated election fraud involves manipulations, miscounting or discarding of actual ballots by corrupt election officials rather than the repeated casting of ballots by the same voter or ballot-box stuffing.[8]  Still, hard evidence is rare and usually confined to cultures where fraud is perfectly acceptable anyway -- as it used to be until relatively recently even in North America.

            Charges of gross and endemic electoral corruption are discounted on the bases that "the evidentiary base […] is quite thin and consists mostly of secondary accounts,"[9] is ”everywhere anecdotal,"[10] and is "fragmentary and uneven"[11]?   One review of the published literature on "fraudulent election practices" concludes:

The evidence to demonstrate the existence of massive election fraud is not only anecdotal, it is unsystematic, impressionistic, and by and large inconclusive.  Almost all contemporary allegations of vote fraud were based primarily upon sweeping, generalized, often highly emotional charges substantiated in most cases by only the most fragile evidence, if supported at all.[12]

Some skeptics even insinuate that those inquiring into fraudulent electoral practices have an ulterior motive.  Such skeptics ask: "Who were these people socially?  What were their objectives?"[13]  The objective is to discredit those who made such allegations on the deterministic basis that they came from the upper levels of society; consequently, they must have been reacting against the conditions of urbanizing, industrializing America with its vast immigrant population.  Their allegations were apparently intended to weaken political parties and universal suffrage.  Apparently "corruption inevitably followed from universal suffrage and democracy."[14]  Still, "it need not follow that the substance was inaccurate because the style was suspect and motive self-seeking."[15]

            Moreover, the tables can be turned: Those who attempt to discount election fraud may "have a motive of their own […] This concern is most evident in […] 'Vote Fraud and Data Validity.'"[16] whose authors are cognizant of that fact that "if elections were universally fraudulent, then the results of these elections are distortions of popular attitudes and of dubious validity.  If election data are invalid, then the study of mass voting behavior is an exercise in futility."[17]  If votes are fixed, what point is there to analyzing the data -- this would put plenty of social scientists out of work and at the same time dismiss their lifework: If fraud and bribery determine elections, "then the elaborate analysis of campaigns and voting patterns is an exercise in cynicism and futility."[18]  Such analysis furthermore relies on voting being

an act that expressed deeply held cultural and religious values that were represented and implemented by the major parties, and that the party system satisfied the electorate.  But widespread election fraud suggests that many voters did not regard their parties as essential vehicles of cultural expression nor their votes as especially important in either a symbolic or instrumental sense. […] The subject [sic] thus not only represents a challenge to the methodology […] in terms of raising data validity, but also raises questions of deeper significance concerning the portrayal of political culture and the party system.[19]

In this light, research into electoral fraud is necessarily empirically challenged.  Still, the misperceptions deduced from the apparent lack of empirical data stand to be corrected:

The quantitative analysis characteristic of the more sophisticated recent political studies […] is based on the use of descriptive statistics to analyze numerical data in terms of central tendencies, variances and relationships among interval variables.  And while "massive fraud" injects distortion into any analysis, the reality of election fraud [is] its strategic, not massive, nature.  Only in those areas where relatively minor changes in the recorded popular vote would result in a different electoral outcome was there any incentive for fraudulent activity.[20]

Argersinger develops a dichotomous approach based on three preconditions:

1.      High levels of partisanship,

2.      Electoral competitiveness,

3.      Slight shifts in voting or turnout could turn the whole election.[21]

On this foundation we develop our own method, designed to justify our case.  First, we call results into question by arguing that the election outcome should have differed from the actual result based on the available historical evidence.  We show that in each case, one contender had a historically verifiable interest in skewing the vote and was in a position to do so because highly partisan conditions encourage the manipulation of a seemingly "insignificant" number of votes to ensure the desired outcome -- thus also minimizing any trace of potential evidence; under such highly competitive conditions, the structure of the electoral process facilitates manipulation. If construed too narrowly, however, this latter condition can be too constraining.  Some, for instance, confine election fraud to the violation of the voters' "rational will" such as "falsification of the vote count by election officials," voter intimidation and "repeating" or casting multiple ballots by one voter.[22]  To this list one might add registration fraud by partisan election officials, ballot-box stuffing, violence at the polls, impersonation and the "colonization" of voters, altering ballots to invalidate them or change their meaning and altering returns.  This narrow definition excludes techniques that ostensibly did not constitute a direct violation of the voter's "rational will:" heavy-handed campaigning such as employers warning their workers of possible unemployment in the event of a particular election outcome, and bribery, which is dismissed as a voter's "willing" acceptance of something in exchange for his ballot.  The obvious advantage is that "to define this type of corruption away reduces the incidence of 'vote fraud.'"[23]  Yet, it does nothing to disprove illegal activity.  As a matter of fact, "more is known about bribery at the polls than [about] the clandestine acts of a few election officials."[24]

            In the end, scholars must recognize that legal and political determinants of the actual conduct of elections often shaped electoral outcomes as much as did issues, candidates or the social bases of mass political behavior.  Fraud, then, is "made possible by the interaction among the institutional framework, the competitive partisan balance of the party system and the political culture."  It is within this setting of electoral competitiveness and partisan or weak institutional arrangements that the issue of electoral fraud should be carefully evaluated.[25]

            From this evaluation, a trend crystallizes: The techniques used to manipulate the vote are becoming ever more sophisticated.  The incentive for optimizing the technique(s) of manipulation is to minimize the variable of the individual voter as a determinant in the desired result.  In other words, the ideal technique minimizes the uncertainty inherent in a voter's subjectivity by turning that voter into a submissive agent -- all the while maintaining an aura of legitimacy.  Not all electoral systems and conditions lend themselves equally well to manipulation.  We thus concede that proportional representation may structurally be less prone to manipulation than electoral systems based on a formula of representation by population.  Nonetheless, we contend that this thesis may hold elsewhere and that our method is likely to produce definitive research results in other jurisdictions as well.

2. The evolution of fraudulent practices: from retail to wholesale

Usually gerrymandering is associated with redrawing electoral boundaries in favor of the incumbent government.  But in 1917 the Dominion government of Sir Robert Borden took the practice to a whole new level.  His is probably the single greatest feat in Canadian electioneering.  Canada was at war and many of her citizens were engaged overseas.  At the same time, conscription had made Borden's Conservative government deeply unpopular in Quebec and in the then relatively scarcely populated Western provinces.[26]  An election win was unlikely under current conditions.

            First, Borden resorted to pretty traditional means.  In Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia he reduced the number of ridings; consequently, district boundaries had to be withdrawn, in each case to the detriment of the Liberals.  By contrast, the number of Western ridings mushroomed by 50 percent.  Borden added 5 in Manitoba, 6 in Saskatchewan, 5 in Alberta, and 6 in British Columbia.  These additions caused a massive redrawing of the Western electoral map, once again at the Liberals' expense.  But in Quebec, simply adding or eliminating ridings and just redrawing electoral boundaries would surely not suffice: As a result of the conscription crisis, popular support for the Conservatives had plummeted to about half of what it had been only six years earlier.[27]

            Borden solved his problem by expanding the electorate.  With the collaboration of his minister of justice Meighen introduced The War Time Election Act (WTEA), which had a variety of novel features. It disenfranchised Canadians who had immigrated from an enemy country prior to the war.  Conversely, the Act enfranchised women, allowing wives and mothers of men serving in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) to vote federally.  In principle, the expansion of the franchise was a rather progressive step.  The conundrum, then, is not the idea as such but rather the motive driving it: Borden strategically enfranchised women with a strong propensity to support the Unionist government and conscription.  After all, their husbands and sons were fighting for King and Country, shouldn’t everyone do their share?[28]

            While these aspects of the WTEA would not constitute what is traditionally accepted as ‘gerrymandering,’ having over 400,000 (25% of the electorate)[29] people vote in areas where Unionist support was weak must certainly be the largest case of manipulation in Canadian history.[30]  Members of the Canadian Expeditionary force serving everywhere from France to Mesopotamia were permitted to vote in the 1917 election.  This in itself was not unusual.  The precedent had been set when members of the Canadian Army were allowed to vote in the 1900 general election while serving in the Anglo-Boer War.[31]  In the 1917 election, however, soldiers were encouraged by their superior officers to claim residence in ridings where Unionist support was weak.[32]  In effect they were told where to vote: Suddenly an Anglophone from British Colombia was casting a ballot for a candidate in a francophone riding three thousand kilometers away in Quebec.  Senior officers and chaplains encouraged their soldiers to vote for the ‘Unionist’ government as the Unionists supported conscription which would -- in their minds -- bring a swift and victorious end to the war, whereas the Laurier Liberals were opposed to conscription.  The soldiers' electoral duty was thus transformed into a loyalty issue: Voting Unionist was being true to King and Country, while voting Liberal was tantamount to surrendering and losing all honour.[33]

                In a first-past-the-post electoral system, it is every politician's dream to be able to relocate votes to areas where popular support is weak.  In 1917, this was done on a national scale.  When the returns were counted, Borden was stunned at the success of his scheme.[34]  Unionists secured 152 out of 234 seats, a comfortable majority.[35]  The aberration is even more evident in the percentage of the popular vote rallied by the Conservatives, 57%, the highest support ever received by any party in a federal election in Canada.

            The 1917 election saw a 78% voter turn out.  Until then, the highest turnout had been 70%.  A total of 1,464,848 votes were cast.[36]  Of those 403,000 were cast by members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, and an additional 185,000 votes by recently enfranchised women.[37]  Both groups were overwhelmingly predisposed to the Unionist government.  At the same time, the government had successfully disenfranchised groups that it was certain were opposed to conscription.  Even if we estimate that only 80% of CEF soldiers and women voted in favor of the Unionists -- we have to allow for some agency on the part of voters -- that still leaves 470,400 (or 32%) votes guaranteed for the Unionists, most of which could be cast in ridings where support was soft.

2.2. Fraud and Patronage        

How far can a government push the envelope without calling its own legitimacy into question?  Far more than gerrymandering, the issue of staple and corporate patronage has been a continual sore point with Canadians.[38]  The patronage system has always been instrumental in gaining the support of a large number of voters across a province.  In fact, patronage has had a profound impact on governance in Canada.  Take jurisdictional disputes, for instance.  Ontario Premier Oliver Mowat is credited with starting the provincial rights movement in the 1880s.  But Macdonald and Mowat

were engaged not in an arid debate on a nice point of constitutional law but in […] a life and death struggle […] as to who would control such things as the voters' list, the liquor licenses and the natural resources, and so build up with the resultant patronage and graft a powerful political machine.[39]

In its dispute with the federal government, Ontario soon found a willing ally in Quebec.

            While patronage in Quebec is commonly associated with Maurice Duplessis and his Union Nationale, Duplessis learned the ropes from his Liberal predecessor Sir L.A. Taschereau.  Ridings that elected a government member to the legislative assembly would be blessed with infrastructure programs, government contracts and the like.  Companies that received public contracts, permits or tax exemptions would divert some of the dividend back to the party's coffers.[40]  The same was true for establishments who held or were seeking a liquor permit -- and for those establishments who sold liquor without a permit but wanted to avoid being raided by the authorities.[41]  Government jobs were easy to come by for those who at election time exerted themselves for the good of the party.[42]  In many ways, this is still standard practice not only in Quebec but in countries the world over, in part because patronage is an exigency for a functional democratic system.

            From a functionalist perspective, then, Canadian political culture used to be, and to a lesser extent still is, patronage-oriented.  The 1984 federal election though is a testament to the way patronage can end up compromising rather than greasing the democratic process.[43]  It is widely accepted that this is the degree to which the system had degenerated in Quebec:

 The party never made a public appeal for funds, never took up a collection at a political meeting, had no revenue from membership fees or the sale of party literature, and yet was able to spend an estimated three to four million dollars in every election campaign […] which was roughly equivalent to the amount spent by the Progressive Conservative party in the country as a whole during the federal election of 1949.[44]

About half the sum was spent on publicity.  The remainder was doled out in the form of gifts, handouts, or other benefits to local organizations.  Influential individuals would receive government jobs or substantial gifts to come out publicly in favor of the party.  Smaller fry were given presents.  Following the Roman custom of panem et circenses, food and entertainment were provided at the expense of the party.  Obviously free libations always played a key role.[45]

        On polling day, every polling station had a paid party scrutineer on hand.  Cars were hired to chauffeur voters.  "Telegraphers" were paid off to cast multiple votes.  Opposition committee rooms would be smashed up and opposition supporters intimidated.[46]

            These practices were a definite handicap for the opposition.  But the greatest handicap was that through control of the legislature, the electoral machinery was fashioned along the lines which would disadvantage the opposition the most.  For provincial elections, Canadian provinces control such matters as qualifications for voting, organization of the balloting, and redistribution of seats.  The government could thus favor rural or urban areas through the allocation of seats and gerrymandering electoral boundaries.  In Quebec it was standard practice to skew the technicalities of the process of enumeration process in the governing party's favor by having a partisan enumerator who would inquire about voting intentions only to drop certain voters from the registration list or add fictitious others who would mysteriously show up to vote.[47]  In addition, election officials were granted immunity from prosecution.  To deter anyone from contesting results, the Union Nationale moved this domain from the Superior to the Magistrates Court because the appointments of the latter were within provincial jurisdiction.  Dozens of ballots in opposition ridings would be invalidated by the official's neglecting to initial them properly.  Some ballot boxes were stuffed while others mysteriously disappeared.

            Just how many seats the opposition was deprived of due to such practices is impossible to say with any precision.  During the 1956 election, for instance, the Liberals lost by a very narrow margin in about half a dozen urban constituencies, and also a few rural ones, where they probably should have won.  "In another half dozen urban seats where the Liberals should have been easy victors they just managed to squeeze through."[48]  Clearly, the manipulation was intended to bring about the desired outcome where the result was expected to be close.

2.3. The machine

This chapter of Quebec history is common knowledge.  It is, however, less well known that similar practices permeated Canadian political culture.[49]  In New Brunswick, the "hiring" of cars was standard practice -- even if it was just to get its owner to drive to the polls.[50]  Men received bottles of liquor, women silk stockings and chocolates.  In the hope of extracting a higher bribe, some voters reportedly did not vote until late in the day.  Others received bribes in return for agreeing not to cast their vote.  Again, such practices were most widespread in counties where the electoral outcome was not evident.[51]  While we do not know for sure how widespread the problem was out West, we do know that such practices ran rampant in Saskatchewan at least until the defeat of the provincial Liberal government in 1929.[52]  There is good reason to believe that the federal parties also resorted to such practices.  At the very least this holds true for New Brunswick and Saskatchewan were there was extensive collusion between the federal and the provincial authorities.[53]

            Yet, the Liberals outperform the (Progressive) Conservatives as far as manipulation goes.  This theory is explicable by the now established fact that the incumbent always has a leg up on the challenger -- and at the federal level the Liberals have simply been in power more often and for longer stretches of time than the Tories.

            In Federal elections a variety of interesting tools have been used to manipulate the vote.  To be sure, “hard” historical evidence is scarce, yet one can easily reconstruct the atmosphere.  The Conservative governments of Sir John A. Macdonald were rife with corruption and scandal; indeed he lost the 1873 federal election on this issue.[54]  Yet in 1891 he returned to his old habits. The Canadian Pacific Railway was once again in need of funds from the government, thus Sir William van Horne is reported to have given Lady Macdoanld a diamond necklace valued at £40,000.[55]  This at a time when the highest paid government official was earning £10,000 per annum.[56]  The necklace is said to have saved the Canadian Pacific Railway from bankruptcy.  Not surprisingly the CPR was the largest single donor to the Conservative Party in the 1891 election, and shortly after the election they were provided with enough government funds to forestall bankruptcy.  This was not so much vote fixing, but rather the purchasing of support on a massive scale.  Unfortunately the only proof we have is rumors from the period, and a few photographs of Lady Macdonald wearing a particularly stunning diamond necklace that was certainly beyond the means of a colonial Prime Minister!

            The 1904 General election saw the Conservatives employ a new strategy. They had been out of office since 1896 and were anxious to wrest control from Laurier and the Liberals.[57]   Basically the scheme involved third-party support for a phony Liberal candidate to stand for election in a given riding.  The candidate would win the nomination and stand in the Federal election.  Then only days before the vote he would resign.  Thus the Conservative candidate would be acclaimed.  However, this plan was not initiated by the Conservative Party, but rather its powerful supporters -- notably the Chairman of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and Sir Hugh Graham, owner of the pro-Imperial Montreal Star. Graham was implicated in a scheme that bribed journalists to support the Conservative cause.[58]  Clearly Graham was a great political manipulator, having largely instigated English Canada’s desire to enter the Anglo-Boer War on the side of Britain.[59]  However, Graham did not limit his questionable political involvement to Canada alone.  He was one of the first to “purchase” a peerage from then British Prime Minister Lloyd George.[60]  This resulted in a public scandal in Canada about honors and a lengthy Royal Commission in Britain!

            These examples illustrate the Conservative Party’s propensity to engage in questionable electoral tactics, yet the Liberal Party employed many of the same methods.  Roland Michener, who would later become Canada’s Governor-General, experienced the full force of the Liberal Party machine in the 1953 election.  Michener, a Progressive - Conservative, had unsuccessfully run in the riding of Toronto - St. Paul in the 1949 election.  By 1953, the Liberal party had been controlling the levers of power at the federal level for nearly twenty years. Michener stood for the Toronto seat once again.  Two weeks prior to the election it was discovered by Progressive-Conservative and CCF officials that enumeration lists had been “padded.”[61]  It was an old Liberal tactic to resurrect voters from the dead.  Non-existent residents had been created, an apartment building which consisted of only a steel frame was -- according to the enumeration list -- already fully occupied.  While one might discount ten or twelve extra votes, it was discovered that in one poling district alone 248 out of 739 -- or exactly one third -- of registered voters were either non-existent or ineligible to vote.[62]  A subsequent investigation discovered more ‘ghost voters.’  By election day the enumeration lists had been corrected and Michener won the seat, beating the incumbent by a mere 515 votes.[63]  Following the election, three Liberal party officials were later found guilty of tampering with enumeration lists and sentenced to six months imprisonment.

            This case illustrates two points that are easily overlooked.  The first is that in Canadian federal and provincial elections where there are often three candidates, the margin needed to win an election is extremely small.  Thus twenty extra names added to the enumeration list of every polling station could easily result in victory for the party engaging in 'padding.’  The other conspicuous element is that if and when ‘padding’ is discovered, it is invariably only lower-level party officials who are tried for the crime.

            By 1957, after twenty-two years at the helm, the Canadian public had become weary of the Liberals. They would lose the 1957 and 1958 general elections, and the Progressive-Conservatives came to power. With the Liberal defeat, many of the old-line party organizers and cabinet ministers left the Canadian political scene.  With the departure of these senior party men instances of enumeration list ‘padding,’ were almost non-existent in the federal elections that would follow over the next twenty years.  Is there a correlation between these two facts?  Perhaps, yet again we are left with more plausible anecdotes than concrete evidence.

3. The machine matures

Still, North Atlantic democracies are not usually thought of as particularly prone to electoral fraud.  This subject is usually associated with the apparent growing pains of nascent democracies.  Lest we forget that not too long ago, electoral fraud was standard practice even in those democracies that today provide monitoring and political education for more recent converts to governance by democratic means.  This is a potentially dangerous development: As advanced democracies shift their attention to electoral fraud elsewhere, the topic has become virtually taboo at home.[64]  So taboo, in fact, that as a subject it is conspicuously absent from the classification system of the Library of Congress.[65]  Perhaps the greatest coup of the sophistication of the manipulation techniques manifest in the electoral machine is to have convinced the electorate that electoral fraud and corruption are a thing of the past -- if people are convinced that it has been stamped out, no one will go looking for it, thus making it easier than ever to rig the vote.

            On election day of the 1998 Quebec provincial election, a journalist with Télévision Quatre Saisons set out to prove the point.  Recording his actions with a hidden camera, Jean-René Dufort encountered no problems whatsoever when he voted half a dozen times at a six polling stations in greater Montréal.  His report on the evening news was designed to dispel the electorate's idyll: to show Quebeckers that the system's vulnerability persists.[66]

            Actually the political system may be more vulnerable today than ever before.  If manipulation is most effective under partisan conditions where a few votes hold the balance, then the electoral situation in all industrialized countries is ripe for abuse because of declining rates of participation.  Robert Putnam calls this the "bowling alone" phenomenon:[67] For the past three decades, Americans have been dropping out of churches, associations… and politics.  Is this disaffection ongoing?[68]  The turnout for the 2000 presidential election was the lowest in American history -- 110 million eligible voters stayed home.  Ostensibly the situation is even more perilous in the United States than elsewhere.[69]  If declining participation is indeed a trend, should governments be concerned?  The rational answer would be that governments should mobilize the alienated part of the electorate.  But why would they?  This trend is working in their favour.  Here is why.  The decline in political participation is not evenly spread across the board.  While certain groups are underrepresented, notably the young, the poor, the less educated, bachelors and families with children, recent immigrants, and some ethnic constituencies, others turn out in disproportionately high numbers, notably above-average income earners, the elderly, the religious, and couples without children.[70]  The explanation is obvious: For one reason or another, they actually have something at stake (preservation of the status quo, health care, tax cuts, etc.) whereas neither the young nor the poor tend to figure prominently on the political agenda.

            The brokerage style of political mobilization practiced by Canada’s parties has largely involved the allocation of government resources to “buy” the support of specific groups without regard to any conception of an overarching public interest.  Brokerage parties have a tendency to abandon principled commitments for the pragmatic purpose of maintaining as broad an appeal as possible.  Parties lack “permanent positions on specific programs….  Their position varies from election to election, depending on what concerns the electorate at the time.”[71]  As a result of such contradiction of the welfare state problems like unemployment and poverty—whose resolution requires long-term planning and the implementation of often unpopular measures—remain unresolved:[72] “Competitive largesse of parties with the taxpayers’ money contributes to the escalation of public expenditures (and, hence, public debt) and to the allocation of resources not according to need of a coherent national plan, but to electoral expediency.”[73]

            That means appealing to amenable constituencies whose vote generally splits along relatively homogeneous lines: Gender, income, ethnicity, region, etc.[74]  We have already seen that such highly partisan conditions are ideal for the purposes of manipulating the vote because the undecided constituency that holds the balance is quite small and well delineated.[75]  Since this constituency is known and well-defined, it can be targeted through electoral niche-marketing.  But even that effort can be narrowed down.  In most ridings it is relatively clear which candidate will carry the day.  The remaining ridings can be divided into those where a given party stands a chance of getting elected and those where it does not.  Obviously the party will concentrate its efforts on those remaining ridings where it is competitive.[76]  In 1997, the Liberals had taken a beating in the Maritimes.  To ensure a governing majority, they had to win those seats back in 2000.  As the governing party, they were in a position to try to buy back those seats.  In the months running up to the election, the Ministry of Fisheries and Oceans, for instance, spent over $30.5 million on local projects, an increase of  almost 600% over the previous year.  Moreover, the government backtracked on Employment Insurance, reverting to a system favoring seasonal workers it had abandoned with great fanfare only three years earlier on grounds of productivity and efficiency.  "[The Canadian government's] influence is called into action […] by its office-holders, who hold out promises in its name.  'Vote for the government, and you shall have such and such a subvention, new railway or appointments.'"  Thus remarked French political scientist André Siegfried in 1906.  The embattled ridings set the tone of the campaign then as they do now -- but the method has changed.  There are comparable situations elsewhere: Some American states, like Florida, are notorious as swing states.

            Should this be cause for concern?  Voting is the backbone of democracy and in recent years Western democracies have relied ever more on this procedure.  The rise in referenda is particularly notable.  This rise has two germane causes.  On the one hand, the trend is towards greater participation in political decision-making.  On the other hand, questions of auto-determination need to be resolved.  Many of these votes are so close that minor manipulation suffices to tip the balance.

            The outcome in Quebec's October 30, 1995 referendum, for instance, separated the Yes and No sides by a mere 54,288 votes, which translates into a difference of one percentage point.[77]  What if the secessionists had inched over the 50%+1 threshold and unilaterally declared independence only to subsequently discover that the result was rigged?  The key is that 86,501 ballots were rejected.  But the rejection rate was not equally high throughout the 125 electoral divisions.  In at least three it was deemed "abnormally high", in one instance even "one of the highest in Quebec's history."[78]  Since it was foreseeable that in all three districts the vote would heavily favor the status quo,[79] rejecting ballots in those districts would invariably favor the 'yes' campaign.  Charges were laid but dismissed on appeal.  Still, in all three instances the court found that most of the ballots had been unreasonably rejected.  How could this happen?

            During the 1980 referendum, the procedure called for the two poll clerks counting the ballots to agree on the content of a ballot.  If they were unable to reach a decision, the ballot was rejected by the deputy returning officer.  But the law was changed just in time for the 1995 referendum: The agreement of both poll clerks was subject to being overruled by the Deputy Returning Officer.  Unlike clerking, the DRO is a partisan position appointed and trained by the governing party, i.e. the party that initiated the referendum in the first place.  Although this was all perfectly legal, was it legitimate, in a sense, to stack the deck, in particular since everybody knew that the result was going to be extremely close?

            Given Canada's experience with referenda, this is a germane question to ask.  Half a century earlier a referendum was held in which 52.3% of Newfoundlanders apparently voted in favor of confederation with Canada.  In 1934, Newfoundland was bankrupt.  Britain assumed Newfoundland's debt; in return Newfoundland reverted from being an independent Dominion to Imperial administration.  In 1948, Newfoundlanders were called upon to make their choice: return to responsible government, five more years of British rule, or join the United States.  Such were the options put to the people by the National Convention set up by Britain to decide Newfoundland's future.  But Britain insisted that confederation with Canada be included as a choice.  It decreed that if no option won an absolute majority, a runoff would be held between the two leading choices.  The speculation was that anybody voting for continued Commission rule distrusted Newfoundland's politicians, and would probably support Confederation in the second round.

            So, Britain was not exactly neutral.  This is understandable since she herself was in financial straits as a result of the war and thus needed to relieve herself of this colonial burden.  All the while, Canada and Britain openly favored (and secretly subsidized) the pro-Confederation campaign.[80]  As a result, it was better organized and funded than its opponents.  Canada even lured Newfoundlanders with a carrot: the baby bonus.  On the first ballot, Confederation received 41.1% of the vote, responsible government 44.6% and Commission 14.3%.  On the second ballot, Confederation apparently won by the narrow margin of 6,989 votes.

            For the counting of the ballot, however, the chief returning officer and the British officials were reportedly in a room on one side of the hallway, while those compiling the results were on the other.  There was no communication between the two.  And as the results from each polling station were tallied, they were carried across the hallway.  So, the only Newfoundlander who would know the final result was the CRO.  No detailed breakdown of either referendum was ever published.  Instead, all ballots were burned two weeks later.  Could the result have been otherwise?  Some in the highest echelons at the time insist that it was.[81]

4. Is there a future for electoral fraud?

Would something comparable be less likely to happen today?  In some ways, yes.  An election or a referendum without a breakdown of results, regional distribution of the vote, et cetera has virtually become unimaginable.  By law ballots usually have to be safeguarded for a certain period of time before they are destroyed.  Yet, given the time it takes for legal challenges to wind their way through the court system, even that may not suffice.[82]  And those who may hope to taint ballots face a far more transparent system where they can no longer hide behind impunity: They are no longer immune from prosecution (although convictions are rare and when they do occur, those convicted tend to be at the lowest stratum of the hierarchy)[83], they have to contend with more highly educated and trained scrutineers, they can no longer resort to violence and intimidation.  Similarly, those expecting party kick-backs in return for public works projects now face charges of influence peddling.[84]  Patronage, then, seems to have been curbed.  At the same time, gerrymandering has been depoliticized.  In Canada, since 1965 an independent non-partisan commission including a judge and an academic has been tasked with drawing constituency boundaries.  Concomitantly, judicial decisions have depoliticized this previously contentious issue in the United States as well.

            In other ways though, modern democracies are on a slippery slope.  Although patronage may have been curbed, its nature, like that of other schemes of manipulation, has shifted paradigmatically from retail to wholesale.  Instead of money flowing directly into partisan pockets, funds are now strategically diverted to specific regions, constituencies, industries and groups to sway opinion.  At the same time, the Quebec referendum illustrates that voter lists continue to be volatile.  And there has never been a lack of overzealous party workers, organizers and strategists.  They are simply resorting to different means to manipulate the vote, notably the media.  So, the potential for corruption persists, in particular as long as election spending is not closely monitored, reported, audited, and limited.  Moreover, the advent of Internet voting adds an unprecedented means for manipulation to an already vulnerable system.[85]

            As long as power is endemic to politics, electoral fraud will continue to prevail in instances where the vote is too close to call.  Referenda can get decided by a margin of a percentage point.  The outcome of a U.S. presidential election can come down to a few votes and every riding matters in securing a slim majority in the distribution of seats in the Parliament.  As liberal democracies rely increasingly on popular consultation to arbitrate potentially explosive political issues, and with manipulation having undergone a paradigm shift from individuals to regions, a renaissance of research on corruption is looming on the electoral horizon.