Election security

Dictators Dictating Elections

When despots or corrupt politicians try to consolidate power for themselves, one of the ways that they accrue influence is to rig elections so that they seem to obtain control legitimately, thereby reducing the likelihood of a popular uprising. This is an especially favorable method of consolidating power when the press is either under the direct control of the government or has similar ideological leanings as the ruling elites.

Within days of Adolf Hitler being appointed German chancellor on January 30, 1933, a move to which Paul von Hindenburg (then the president of Germany) acquiesced because there was no majority party in government and the government was in a state of upheaval, the Nazis issued a decree that not only forbade public meetings where the government might be brought into contempt, but granted themselves power to shut down any newspaper that might bring the government into contempt. Of course, the Nazi definition of contempt was any criticism of Adolf Hitler or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, aka the Nazi Party. Hitler then set about creating the conditions for total control, and that included rigging German elections.