An Election Tampering Primer

So it turns out that working with an election monitoring group (MOE), even for a day, is quite an educational experience. I was struck as we attended an opening ceremonies of sorts for the voting day that everyone there commented on how the elections were going to be free of corruption this year with no voting irregularities.

Of all the promises and speeches that get made on US election days, the idea of voting fraud and corruption is rarely the issue (unless you were voting in Florida in 2000, but whatever). Indeed, the fraud in US elections tends more toward pre-election voter redistricting or moves to require IDs which often disenfranchise one population thus benefiting another. There has been some voter intimidation and I am sure vote buying, but I don't think we have anything on voter fraud Colombian style (not even in Chicago).

We have more thoughts about the meaning and impact of these elections to come, but here is just a taste of the "voting irregularities" that can make monitoring important. Some of these we saw while some we merely heard about.

Vote Tampering:

•  Carousel - Someone outside the voting area gives you a marked ballot (thus ensuring that you vote for their candidate). You take the marked ballot into the voting area, “vote”, and bring the blank ballot back out to the person waiting thus supplying them with another ballot they can fill out for the next carousel rider. You are, of course, paid for your participation.

• Mochilero - This person is named after the bag, “mochila”, he carries. In it is a great deal of money (one person caught on Sunday had about a million and a half pesos on him) with which he goes about soliciting votes. In addition to this being illegal, it is also quite dangerous both because of all the money being carried and because that person becomes a target for an opposing candidate's machine if he is discovered. If the police catch him he will be jailed for a year or so. He (or his family) is paid during this time. While he is in prison or when he gets our he may still be killed by the opposition. It feels a bit like a fool's errand, and yet if your family needs the money...

• Transhumancia – I don't really know how to translate this, because the English “transhumance” refers to livestock migration, but the idea of shuttling from one place to the other is dead on. This fun twist on voting refers to registering and transporting buses of people from one voting district to another. You take folks from one area in which you are not concerned about the vote outcome, and you shuttle them to another place in which you are not so secure. In one community in Atlántico that means having 8,000 people registered to vote in a town with a population of only 5,000...you do the math...

• ID Fraud – Everyone in Colombia has to present an identification to vote (they all get their initial ID cards issued free), yet there continue to be cases when Señora. X shows up at the polling place and finds...she has already voted! In one town this year they implemented fingerprint ID confirmation to try and lower the supplanting of voters. The challenge there was that if your fingerprint did not register (was not able to be read vs. did not match) then there was no back-up confirmation available and you were passed on through, because if you weren't then your right to vote would be denied. Kind of a catch-22.

• Ballot stuffing – Just like it sounds, it showed up at one table where everyone else had 15 votes at their tables and this one had 90...even though that many people had not entered the voting place.

• Vote passing – I love this one. Many voting sites are schools as they are in the United States however, because we live on the Caribbean coast, many schools are basically open air with walls that have open windows and holes for ventilation both in the individual classrooms and around the perimeter. So what is the easiest way to dispose of votes you don't like or get some you do? Just pass them through the wall!

• Transportation manipulation – This scheme has two faces.

1.  A candidate pays people TO bring folks to the polls. A man we know was paid $200,000 (about $100) to drive people back and forth to polling sites all day long. To put this in perspective, $515,000 is the amount you would earn in a month if you had a job that paid you minimum wage (though many folks do not actually make that), so running folks to the polls for one day would get you over a third of what you would make in a month. Makes you wish elections came around more often...
2. A candidate pays people NOT to bring people to the polls. They are not taken somewhere else, their services are just not available. A bus company is paid to keep their buses in the lot. Taxi drivers are paid to stay home. I don't have a contact to know how much this one pays, but I think few of us would turn down being paid to not work.