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  • 3 - Constitutions and Abusive Electoral Regulation

  • from Part I - Understanding the Crisis
  • Edited by Tom Ginsburg, University of Chicago, Aziz Z. Huq, University of Chicago, Tarun Khaitan, London School of Economics and Political Science
  • Book:
    The Entrenchment of Democracy
    Published online:
    16 December 2024
    Print publication:
    05 December 2024, pp 46-60
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  • Summary

    Independent electoral commissions can and do play an important role in protecting and promoting the “minimum core” of electoral democracy around the globe – including by postponing or setting aside elections that cannot or have not been conducted freely and fairly, excluding candidates and parties unwilling to comply with constitutional requirements, discounting tainted or fraudulent votes, and recounting electoral tallies. But there are dark sides to these broad-ranging powers. When electoral commissions are coerced or captured by authoritarian actors, these same powers can be used to undermine the fairness and competitiveness of the electoral playing-field, rather than protecting it. Any discussion of the promise of independent electoral commissions as democratic institutions, therefore, must be counter-balanced by attention to the capacity for this very discourse to be “abusively borrowed” in a way that undermines democracy.