Importance of public trust in the electoral process

Solly Rakgomo | Monday February 26, 2024 06:00

In modern times, the electoral process constitutes the closest approximation to a method of citizen oversight of the government. Under the umbrella of democracy, elections are organised, carried out, and adjudicated through several distinct formal mechanisms and formulas, which correspond to different principles.

The idea of the “democratic guarantee” is inherent to all these principles, which form the pillars underlying the legitimacy and recognition of elected governments. Democratic principles have common objectives; to ensure the legitimating capacity of elections and to provide democracies with normative importance. These elements generally guarantee democratic governability. Free and fair elections bring legitimacy to elected leaders and to the democratic principles that government represents.

It is very common for many people including political observers and analysts such as Anorld Greenberg and Dave Mattes to measure the quality of elections only by free and fair elections but Hannah Norris includes a battery of other items. For electoral integrity, she uses the following items: votes are counted fairly, election officials are fair, voters offered genuine choice in an election, and journalists provide fair coverage of elections. For electoral malpractices, she mentions rich people buying elections, state media favouring the government party, opposition candidates prevented from running and voters threatened with violence at the polls.

It is within this context that in order to ensure integrity and public trust in the electoral process there is need to have a strong and independent Electoral Management Body mandated with guaranteeing democratic continuity through the consistent and effective organisation of elections. Electoral Management Bodies have to carry out the electoral process by maintaining the trust of both political actors and the public. The legitimacy of elected officials is proportional to the level of trust that political parties and citizens place in the electoral authority or electoral management body and its ability to carry out its organisational responsibilities during elections.

From this, one can safely argue that public confidence in each step of an election process is critical to the integrity of the election. This is because citizens not only have a right to participate in elections, they have a right to know for themselves whether the electoral process is valid. Access to information about each phase of the election process is fundamental to creating and reinforcing public confidence in elections.

That knowledge is the basis for public confidence in elections and their resulting governments. This then calls for an electoral management body to act on the best interest of the public through adhering to laid out institutional frameworks that governs democratic electoral processes.

In simple terms, an electoral management body such as the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) in Botswana, should thoroughly understand the virtues of integrity and public trust in their day-to -day responsibilities of organising elections. It is crucial for an institution like the IEC to understand that an independent and impartial body charged with implementing elections is an important means of ensuring the integrity of the electoral process.

An effective electoral management body, responsible for implementing much of the process, can enable the participation of voters and protect the democratic process. So it is within this context that electoral management bodies like the IEC should thrive for utmost fairness, transparency and impartiality when carrying out their responsibilities such as voter education, voter registration, polling operations, counting and tabulation and settlement of electoral disputes.

The simple requirement is for the electoral management body to uphold national law as per the constitution during the electoral process. Failure to meet this requirement has a huge potential to soil the integrity of the election process, create a public trust deficit and in other cases create a fertile ground for electoral violence.

Bill Gray, a seasoned Electoral Commissioner within the AEC has this to say about public trust in the electoral process; “building trust is very difficult and takes time, while losing trust is brutally simple and often fatal”. Gray’s statement can be used as a good advice to electoral management bodies such as the IEC to understand that public trust reinforces belief in democratic institutions and underpins the acceptance of the election results that enable democratic and stable transitions of power. This public trust can only be achieved if the electoral management is constituted and operates under the fundamental guiding principles of independence, impartiality, integrity, transparency, efficiency, professionalism and service-mindedness. If any of these constitutive principles are lacking, the electoral management body’s work may generate further concerns and chaos that can in turn lead to outbreaks of election-related violence.

Notable example is the Nigeria parliamentary and presidential elections 2007. During the 2007 elections, Nigeria experienced widespread violence resulting in the deaths of 200 people. According to a number of observers, the election was marred by deficiencies in their official organisation, along with allegations of vote rigging and other electoral malpractices. Immediately following the announcement of the results, protesters took to the streets and demonstrations were subdued, often violently.

In summation, it is important for electoral management bodies (the IEC in particular) that nothing kindles democracy’s energies, anxieties, hopes, and frustrations like an election. The quality of an election can spell the difference between a cooking fire and an explosion. If a successful election can calm and focus a nation such as Namibia 2015, a disputed election can tear it apart (e.g. Burundi 2015, Côte d’Ivoire 2010, Kenya 2008).

This then calls for the IEC to work hard in winning the hearts and minds of the citizens by fully demonstrating that it is an independent and impartial institution that can successfully run credible elections. The institution has an uphill battle to win public trust at the back of a recent court case, which challenged the institution’s transparency in voter registration and the controversial benchmarking exercise in Zimbabwe, a country whose electoral management process has attracted negative perceptions for many years.