Do you recall the allegation, back in 2023, that ID cards belonging to deceased foreign-born Maltese citizens were given to other foreign residents for them to vote for the Labour Party? The aftermath was that the incumbent administration shot it down for being spurious while, needless to say, no police investigation or some sort of inquiry was conducted.

Election day will soon be upon us, and maybe now is a good time to somehow grasp the electoral fraud threat and its possible types, magnitude and determinants. The procedures for converting votes into political power can distort the meaning of the general will and, worse still, produce a collective choice that violates the preferences of many citizens. Indeed, the opportunities for electoral fraud generated by voter registration, polling station operation and tallying procedures can never be underestimated. There is no reason to suppose that fraud is empirically intractable.

Efforts to assess the role of electoral fraud in politics can range from claims that fraud is an isolated, random event to claims that ballot rigging is rampant. Understanding the extent of fraud is indispensable for deciding whether it merits systematic attention.

Common sense initially suggests that an activity is fraudulent if its perpetrator wants it hidden from public scrutiny. Manifestly fraudulent behaviours-such as coercing voters at the polling station to cast ballots for party X or filling the ballot box with votes for party X-are things that only their victims want publicised. Even procedural violations, such as a polling station opening late and closing early or failing to advertise its location before election day, may sound like fraud because the perpetrator would prefer that no one learn of these facts. Both blatantly coercive acts and voting irregularities are also fraudulent because they can throw off election results.

There is a fine line between fraud and political pressure, though. To take an example, landlords or private employers are not guilty of electoral fraud if their tenants or employees are somehow cajoled to vote for their party. Regardless of whether they have been duped into voting in favour of the landlord's party or wish to avoid the reprisals associated with voting against their employer's party, these activities are not really fraudulent, even if they are morally reprehensible. Even if it can be demonstrated that they voted against their own interests, we cannot call this fraudulent unless a law has been broken.

So, in addition to being concealed and potentially affecting election results, an act is fraudulent if it breaks the law. Indeed, parties go out of their way to do things in the dark precisely because they are doing something wrong before or on election day. They are taking advantage of the legal machinery of the electoral process to steal an election they believe they cannot win fairly. A key advantage of a legalistic conception of fraud is that it permits assessing the location of the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable political activity.

In essence, electoral fraud is an illegal interference with the process of an election. Electoral fraud can take different forms-including in-person voter fraud, fraudulent activity involving absentee voters, and voter suppression-and can occur at different points of the election process, from registration to the tallying of ballots.

Voter registration fraud is a form of vote fraud in which someone registers to vote or registers someone else to vote using a fictional name or without that person's consent. At a later stage, one may attempt to vote more than once, using the name of another person, or attempt to vote while being knowingly ineligible to do so.

Voter suppression involves policies and tactics that place an undue limitation on the ability of citizens to cast countable ballots in an election. In recent years, there has been debate about what policies and tactics constitute voter suppression or serve to promote and preserve election integrity. Gerrymandering figures in this sense, too.

Voter impersonation is a type of vote fraud in which a person claims to be someone else when casting a vote, while voting in the name of a deceased person is a form of vote fraud in which someone casts a vote under the name of a deceased person, whose name remains on the state's list of registered voters.

Voter caging refers to a practice in which a political party or another partisan organisation sends registered mail to the addresses of registered voters whom they have identified as likely to be unfriendly to their candidate. All mail that is returned as undeliverable is placed on what is called a caging list. The group then challenges the right to vote of the people on the list on the grounds that if the voters are unreachable at the address listed on their voter registration, then they are not eligible to vote in that area.

Fraud undermines political stability because, in close races, it can be decisive. If rates of voter participation continue to fall, then fabricating a handful of votes may be sufficient to retain or regain power, as the case may be. Moreover, ballot rigging robs elections of credibility and therefore prevents the consolidation of democratic institutions.

The Electoral Commission needs to be on guard against electoral fraud because certifiers of electoral returns often dismiss allegations of fraud by claiming that legal violations do not affect results.

Dr. Mark Said