‘Fake News’ to Undermine the Mexican Electoral Authority

The next IAMCR 2019 session is on ‘fake news’, and we start with Julio Juarez Gamiz who focusses on ‘fake news’ directed at the national electoral authority in the 2018 Mexican presidential elections.

There is substantial mistrust of electoral authorities given that, until recently, Mexico had the same party in power for some 70 years; in 1988, the system that provides vote count updates broke down altogether as it showed the opposition in the lead, and by the time it came back online the government was back in the lead. This is still seen as a marker of the worst failure of electoral processes in the country.

There are also significant conspiracy theories about hacks of electoral systems in recent years (a Colombian hacker claimed to have hacked the 2012 election, changing its outcome), and all of this predates the considerable focus on election hacking and disinformation campaigns that became a topic in the wake of Russia’s interference with the 2016 U.S. election and other polls.

But what does ‘hacking an election’ actually mean, and who is behind it? Often the literature blames fringe political groups – usually driven by young white men – and foreign powers – chiefly, Russia –, and such perspectives are reproduced well beyond cases like those of the U.S. Such attacks are seen as trying to influence public opinion, promoting certain disruptive narratives, suppressing voter participation, or directly altering vote counts (especially where they are collected electronically). This also positions electoral authorities as central actors in these narratives: election attacks often also seek to undermine trust in such authorities, and weaken their position as independent umpires.

Mexican elections have now become very tight contests, and the electoral system is very sophisticated, but as a country it has a very low approval rate for democratic processes; this does not mean that people do not participate in elections, but they have very little hope that the outcomes will change anything in the country. In order to avoid fraud, voters need a photo ID card to vote, and are fingerprinted as they do so; there are also various security measures relating to ballot papers and electoral materials. Its electoral authority also has a very strong follower base on Twitter.

Conspiracy theories attacking these authorities build on ideology and argumentation, and seek to mislead voters by building on historical experience of election fraud. This positions the authority as an accomplice of whatever party is currently in power, and follows a relatively generic script.