The nature of an election makes it vulnerable to a range of security threats against participants, infrastructure, information and materials.
Effective election security analysis must draw on information and expertise from multiple arenas. A high-level of communication and coordination among the agencies responsible for the administration and security of an election is a significant advantage. Neither can security analysis and planning be effective when it occurs only in a period shortly before the electoral process starts, nor depend solely on reactive strategies. Anticipating and pre-empting security risks, mitigating their impact or probability of occurrence, is a strategic endeavour of both the electoral authorities and their security partners.
An electoral process is constituted from a complex series of interdependent sub-processes, generically including: boundary delimitation, civic education, voter education, voter registration, party registration, candidate nomination, the campaign period, polling operations, tallying and counting, dispute resolution and the official announcement of results. With the exception of boundary delimitation (which often occurs following a decennial census exercise) these sub-processes occur in some form during each election cycle.
Each of these sub-processes can be characterised by different types of threats, influenced by: the particular approach adopted, cross-influence between sub-processes and the individual circumstances of the election.
Further, the circumstantial conditions of an election can alter quickly, requiring the rapid reprioritisation or invalidation of initial security assumptions. Accordingly, the analysis of threats and risks is a continuous task throughout the electoral process, and is not simply event driven.
The types of security threats likely to arise in a particular election are influenced by both structural and circumstantial aspects of the election process. The structural design of the electoral process such as the choice of electoral system may foster or deter certain threats. For instance, an electoral system that uses a single national district (the national borders form a single electoral constituency) and allows voters to cast their vote at any polling station, will offer no direct incentive to forcibly move voters within the territory – since irrespective of where the vote is cast, it will be counted in the final tally.
On the other hand, this arrangement may promote efforts to forcibly migrate eligible voters across national borders, so they cannot participate. In security terms, this scenario reflects a heightened structural risk for border control operations during the voter registration and polling phases of an election.
Circumstances will dictate in each election, and at each stage of the electoral process, the level and priority of risk posed by different threats. For example, when an election is a presidential run-off (the final two candidates competing), the danger of political assassination represents a significantly higher risk than an election of several hundred parliamentarians to an assembly. Similarly, if an election is being conducted as part of a post-conflict peace agreement, it has a very different risk profile to an election held in a country with an unbroken history of democratic elections.
One methodology to map an election’s risk profile is by the identification of mission critical assets (people, infrastructure, information and materials), without which, the election cannot reasonably proceed. In combination, the unique structural and circumstantial aspects of an election will dictate at what phase of the process an asset is critical, and notably, if this may change between sub-processes. Some electoral processes by their nature are better able to adapt to certain types of attack. For instance, the destruction of ballot boxes at a polling station after polling has been completed may or may not cripple the ability of the electoral authorities to produce a result from the election.
The impact of such an attack will vary significantly depending on a range of both structural and circumstantial factors. Separating ‘mission critical’ from ‘recoverable’ threats is a key step in building the election risk profile and determining priorities.
Against the backdrop of these regular security challenges, several new threat trends have emerged in the past few years. These include international terrorism and organised crime:
International terrorism
As a well-recognised ritual of democracy, elections can attract threats from diverse groups, whose motivations may have no connection to the national stakes of an election. As recent events have demonstrated, international terrorists have the capacity and motivation to conduct “spectacular attacks” geared towards fulfilling their own propaganda agendas. The intensity of media coverage during an election is a highly visible period, affording an attractive opportunity for such attacks to occur.
Organised Crime
The political tensions that arise during an election offer organised crime groups an appealing opportunity – at a time when the authorities’ ability to differentiate between politically motivated violence and criminally motivated violence can be extremely difficult. Paradoxically, a group committing politically motivated offences may try to have their actions interpreted as purely criminal, whereas criminally motivated groups may wish to obscure their actions behind a political façade. Of further concern, these interests have become convergent in some post-conflict settings, where organised criminal groups have been known to kidnap individuals and sell the hostages to political groups for propaganda value.
It is necessary in any section on electoral threats and analysis to highlight a cautious approach in carrying out this function. As noted in the principles above, non-partisanship and impartiality as well as transparency and accountability are important guides for electoral security.
The choice of methods and subjects of information collection, during an election period, must be sensitive to the possibility of interpretation as a political intent and possible backlash. As such, extra emphasis on procedures that adopt checks and balances, are an important safeguard of the analytical process during elections.
