Watching the Wrong Game: How Digital Authoritarians Outpace Election Monitors

Election observation missions led by Western countries remain anchored in methodologies designed for 20th-century elections. Short-term missions mainly focus on ensuring the integrity of election-day activities, such as preventing intimidation, vote-buying, and ballot stuffing at polling stations. In contrast, long-term missions are oriented on electoral legislation, procedural issues, and conventional monitoring of mass media coverage […]