The democracy delusion

Andrés Sepúlveda sleeps behind bombproof doors in a maximum-security prison in central Bogota, Colombia. When travelling to judicial hearings or to meet prosecutors, he is accompanied by a caravan of armed guards with serious firepower. As they move at high speed through the capital, the motorcade uses sophisticated equipment to jam mobile phones to lower the risk of a coordinated assassination attempt.

Sepúlveda is one of the world’s most notorious election-rigging specialists. Now that he has been caught and put in jail, he is helping atone for his crimes by explaining how he fixed elections — and the people he used to work with want him dead.

But Sepúlveda isn’t the only specialist in this field. The tools he was using are deployed around the world. They’re costly, sometimes scandalous, but often legal. The disruption of democracy has become a great global game, and it’s one that British companies are playing too.

The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal raised an obvious question: did its role in mining Facebook data help send Donald Trump to the White House? But there is another angle that is just as important: what did Alexander Nix, its (now suspended) chief executive, mean when he said that his company is ‘used to operating through different vehicles, in the shadows’? That question was buried under the deluge of headlines about Facebook. This is a shame because it appears that there is an even bigger scandal than data-mining waiting to be exposed.

We’re academics, not investigative journalists. But between the two of us, we have crisscrossed the globe from Thailand to Tunisia, from Belarus to Zimbabwe, learning the tricks of the election-rigging trade. We’ve interviewed more than 500 top figures, from prime ministers and presidents downwards.