Are you an aspiring oligarch, dictator or autocrat? Do you want to wield power whilst maintaining a façade of popular support and democratic mandate? Do you want to make your proles believe they have a choice?
Well then, welcome to the first of our “How to…” series. A selection of articles dedicated to teaching aspiring authoritarians how to hide tyranny behind a reassuring mask of freedom.
Here we’ll go into the finer points of how it’s possible to have “elections” that mean almost nothing.
First things first, we need to establish what we mean when we talk about “election rigging”.
Controlling the outcome of an election is a comparatively simple, even vulgar, process. All you need to do is manipulate the count and/or simply lie about the result.
However doing this efficiently – rigging an election with as little effort as possible and disguising that fact is more difficult.
In short, if your rigged election is entirely reliant on simply forging ballots you have done something wrong. If you want to reliably and consistently control the results of your “elections” you need to be more creative than that.
The vast majority of your work pre-election will be dedicated to laying the groundwork, building infrastructure, and lubricating the public.
The vote itself is the final destination in a long journey that starts with…
1. THE SYSTEM
Your first priority when constructing your system should be establishing an infrastructure that is not significantly impacted by elections.
Unelected civil servants, intelligence agencies, military officers, judges, NGOs, corporate interests and lobby groups should form the permanent foundations of the power structure, while “elected officials” should ideally be mere window dressing and wall-paper, with zero opportunity to act independently.
Bill gates just suggested that humanity needs a new God with AI
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