Voter suppression

Some parties in Europe that have less support among expats have made it much more difficult for them to cast ballots by removing vote by mail options, forcing some to travel hundreds of kilometers.

[2] The disenfranchisement of voters due to age, residence, citizenship, or criminal record are among the more recent examples of ways that elections can be subverted by changing who is allowed to vote.

For example, Japan, Switzerland and the United States have the lowest voter turnout rates among developed countries due to holding frequent elections.

Additionally, the implementation of signature-matching processes, especially for mail-in ballots, can also be done so strictly as to suppress orders of magnitude more votes than the actual fraud that it prevents.

[2] Less-regulated campaign spending reduces the influence of every vote by giving more power to wealthy people, special interests and lobbyists.

[10][11] Corruption presents a more widely-recognized form of election subversion or electoral fraud where votes or positions are acquired illegally using money.

Misinformation, disinformation, and the platforms that are incentivized to boost half-truths and lies are forms of information warfare that can be used to confuse, intimidate, or deceive voters.

[13] Common examples include undermining journalism, academia, political speech and other fundamental exchanges of ideas and information.

Free or low-cost sources of information, such as through libraries, schools, nonprofits, public media, or open-source projects (like Wikipedia), have historically supported this key democratic prerequisite.

[8] Ballot referendum can also be a powerful avenue for changing political systems, for example, that are not as responsive to voters due to gerrymandering or other anti-democratic actions and policies.

In Australia, the Prime Minister effectively has the right to determine the date of the election as long as constitutional rules regarding the maximum term of the parliament are adhered to.

[23] The government denied that it was trying to suppress some voters and insisted that the purposes of the reform were a smoother administration of the elections and the reduction of the possibility of electoral fraud.

In the 2022 Brazilian general election, there were attempts by police and political sympathisers to make it more difficult for lower-income people to attend polling stations.

The locations offered by those messages were intentionally false, often led voters several hours from the correct stations, and often identified themselves illegally as coming from Elections Canada.

"[31] The court did not annul the result in any of six ridings where the fraud had occurred because it concluded that the number of votes affected had been too small to change the outcome.

[32] In April 2019, during Israel's general elections for the 21st Knesset, Likud activists installed hidden cameras in polling stations in Arab communities.

It claimed that voter turnout in Arab communities had fallen under 50% by the presence of the agency's observers in the polling stations,[36] though some of this decrease is likely due to a boycott that was planned for the vote.

[41][42][43] In the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, Southern states passed Jim Crow laws to suppress poor and racial minority voters that involved poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses.

[1] In 2013, after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, several states enacted voter ID laws.

[50][51] In Texas, a voter ID law requiring a driver's license, passport, military identification, or gun permit was repeatedly found to be intentionally discriminatory.

[54] In Wisconsin, a federal judge found that the state's restrictive voter ID law had led to "real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities.

"[61] In May 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity for the purpose of preventing voter fraud.

The commission was led by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a staunch advocate of strict voter ID laws and a proponent of the Crosscheck system.

Crosscheck is a national database, which is designed to check for voters who are registered in more than one state by comparing names and dates of birth.

[62] Kobach has been repeatedly sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for trying to restrict voting rights in Kansas.