South Korea conducted elections while the pandemic was raging and managed to do it successfully. With more than two years to go before our own national and local elections, it would be incredibly defeatist to say that we can’t do the same and that the polls should be postponed. Defeatist and anti-democracy.
However, these fears of the country not being ready are not entirely imaginary. Even leaving aside the need to reengineer even the most fundamental processes related to elections, to ensure the safety of both the voting public and election workers, there is much work to be done in eliminating the gray areas that riddle our campaign rules, plugging up the loopholes that have made many of those rules illusory, and updating existing guidelines to account for new developments in technology.
Gray areas
One of the most exploited gray areas in the last elections was the use of commercial billboards featuring electoral candidates shilling for products and services. That strategy clearly worked because now, others seem to want to do it too. This early, a drive around the metropolis will tell you that there are more incumbent government officials on these billboards now than ever before in what may just as well be early positioning or, at the very least, a long-term effort to desensitize the public.
Another gray area is the use of outdoor media, particularly those LED billboards that seem to defy easy categorization. On the one hand, those electronic light boards are able to play video advertisements that you used to see only on broadcast advertisements; and yet it seems they share many of the limitations of printed election propaganda. In the last election, the ad hoc solution— that the size restrictions applied to printed advertisements would have to apply to LED billboards as well —was immediately and obviously problematic. We have the time now to settle this rule once and for all.
Loopholes
And if it sounds like gray areas are trouble, wait until you get to the pre-pre-campaign (no, I didn’t stutter) spending loophole.
Under the existing rules, a candidate can only spend so much on their campaign. Go beyond the spending limit and you risk being knocked out of the race on a charge of campaign overspending—as one governor found out to his cost. But here’s the loophole: election regulators start tolling your campaign expenses only at the start of the campaign period. All expenditures made before that date—which is typically about four months from the time the candidates filed their certificate of candidacy—fall outside regulatory reach.
This is the reason why, as early as October of the year before elections, our airwaves start getting saturated with political ads pretending not to be political ads. Aside from enabling this insult to the intelligence of the average voter, this loophole means that campaigns probably do overspend all the time, and that they’re getting away with it. Just like how keyboard armies got away with weaponizing social media since 2016.
New tech
In 2022, we don’t just have to be on our guard against pandemic viruses, we also have to do something about the viral problem of digitally propagated misinformation and disinformation—fake news. Even now, more than two years up the road from elections, the technological advancements in the field of audiovisual communication already portend massive assaults on truth. And with software for making deepfakes now easily downloadable on the Internet, it is not far-fetched to imagine that we will soon see digitally manipulated audio and video of people saying or doing things they would never say or do.
From the point of view of election management, the deployment of deepfakes in the information environment during election season is almost as a scary as a runaway pandemic.
Start now
For this reason, work on addressing these vulnerabilities—and many others besides—needs to start now. Thankfully, many civil society organizations are capacitated and poised to tackle these problems. Some, in fact, have already started. It’s going be a long slog, but in the end—like this quarantine that we’re still under—it will prove to be worth it.