Having led election monitoring efforts overseas for 25 years, I can attest that elections can indeed be rigged. When I lived in Cambodia, I worked on an audit of the voter register to assess the quality of Cambodia’s electoral roll before the 2013 election. I found serious problems. More than 10% of voters were inexplicably removed from the list, while more than 10% of the names on the list belonged to no one – the so-called “ghost voters”.

Additionally, following the election, when we analyzed voting records and compared them to census data, we found that voter turnout was as high as 140% in some areas. Meanwhile, many voters showed up on election day and were turned away. This legitimately calls into question the integrity of the election.

The scope of the election integrity work we have helped abroad — from pre-election audits of the voter register, training of election management bodies, long-term and election day observation, to parallel recording of vote counts, audits post-election and electoral law reform — heavily funded by the United States, was to identify problems where they exist to educate, reform and fix.

The larger goal, however, was to establish controls and safeguards to get to a place where observational efforts validate election integrity and building public confidence in the process. Through this experience one quickly learns that the most necessary – and elusive – ingredient for quality choices is confidence.

In the US, we managed to work in the opposite direction. We took a laudable election process – with bipartisan management and varying levels of government control, subject to audits and stress tests, and a grievance adjudication process through the courts – and tried to undermine its integrity and erode public trust.

In 2020, according to the Trump administration’s own officials, the election was labeled “the safest in American history.” Courts have validated the results, hearing dozens of fraud cases filed by the Trump campaign. The audits and recounts were drivenfrom Arizona to Georgia, all confirming the official results. Election officials, such as those in Maricopa County, ground zero for election denialhas made Herculean efforts to increase transparency, debunk and prevent disinformation, and implement additional system checks. Despite all the checks and safeguards, Republican leaders led by Donald Trump continue to undermine the process today and 70 percent of Republican voters believe them.

The result is yet another Orwellian co-optation of reality. Just as those who spread misinformation have become the loudest voices shouting “fake news” or “free speakers” purging the books in our libraries, so-called “election integrity” efforts work against integrity. Groups like the “Election Integrity Project” are false flag operations designed to spread misinformation and erode public confidence. These fall well short of global election observation standards, which detail rules on how to interact with local authorities, media and political actors, types of observation, acceptable terminology and methodologies, and required transparency of funding and disclosure of support.

Americans are heading into another presidential election in which political actors cast doubt on the process, spreading conspiracies and commissioning of officials to disrupt the process. Elections simply cannot be fair if their side loses, setting America up for another potentially volatile post-election period. But the US has also created a global authorization structure for political losers everywhere to reject election results, undermining legitimate election observation efforts.

After 2020, we immediately saw how “lost therefore stolen” became the new black, jumping from the US to Burma and Israelin many cases, with candidates missing out on leaving Trump’s talking points. Infamously, Jair Bolsonaro tore a page from Trump’s playbook, spreading lies about electronic voting ahead of the Brazilian election as he saw his popularity waning. Steve Bannon and other right-wing actors support Bolsonaro’s statement.

Foreign adversaries have helped fuel global election denial by rapidly adopting and repurposing false US narratives to enhance their information operations elsewhere. In the country of Georgia, for example, the Kremlin is preemptively creating an opening to reject the results of Saturday’s election, should the chosen party, Georgian Dream, not win, spreading lies about foreign interference. Before last weekend’s election in Moldova, Russia accused the government of “rigging” the election by banning Russian-backed political movements, and after the election produced a vote for the EU, the Kremlin is now hinting. MIXTURE.

Confidence in elections is not optional in a democracy. Global democracy will continue deteriorationand conflict will follow if the public does not trust the election results. As with disinformation, undermining faith in elections is not about a specific lie or act, but about misrepresentation of reality. Now, the critical work of independent election observers, whom we have supported abroad for years, has become much more difficult.

Highlighting legitimate issues in an election is immediately dismissed as a partisan ploy. And if observers declare the process free and fair, that won’t necessarily prevent allegations of fraud. They are caught between a rock and a hard place as even the word “electoral integrity” has become fraught with contradictions.

The US continues to serve as a model for both good and bad political behavior. As Cambodian leader Hun Sen once did PLEASE NOTE when criticized for his attacks on the media, “Well, Trump did.” Electoral denial is, unfortunately, another export.

Laura Thornton has lived abroad for 25 years, working for democracy promotion organizations from Thailand and Cambodia to Georgia. She is senior director for global democracy at the McCain Institute.

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