The Spectator Podcast: How to Rig an Election

On this week’s episode, we discuss how elections across the world have been taken advantage of to give more power to corrupt leaders. We also talk about the international persecution of Muslims, and ask, why don’t young Corbynites care about anti-Semitism?

While the world has been reeling from news of Cambridge Analytica’s political interference, two academics have been following the trail of shady election rigging across the world that go deeper than social media. Professor Nic Cheeseman, at the University of Birmingham, and Dr Brian Klaas at the LSE, have visited developing democracies from Asia, to Africa, to Europe. In this week’s cover piece, they explain the extent of election rigging in these countries, and what we, in mature democracies, can do about it. Brian tells us:

‘We talk in the book about “strategic rigging”, where despots and dictators and counterfeit-democrats all use savvy techniques to be more stealthy in their rigging, and they’re getting away with it more.