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Introduction
Democracy and elections are intrinsically linked, as democracy is established by elections. To establish democratic governments, electorates exercise their sovereignty by casting votes for their preferred political parties, which compete to rule in their countries. Nevertheless, flaws in electoral systems can lead to election-rigging or electoral fraud, which each constitutes grave threats to sustaining democratic values and maintaining integrity in electoral processes in any liberal democracy. According to Lehoucq (2003), electoral fraud and ballot-rigging reduce electoral turnouts and contribute to the cynicism of the public, which undermines democratic stability and discredits elections, and these things ultimately corrode the democratic body politic.
The political phenomena of electoral fraud or which is threat to electoral integrity have been described differently by different prior studies. Electoral fraud is the result of biases in the administration of elections, including the distortion of the voting process (Schedler, 2002). It is manifested in the forms of blatantly coercive acts and voting irregularities undertaken before or on election days that conceal the true election results and break electoral laws (Lehoucq, 2003). Similarly, election fraud is the deliberate damaging of the oversight provided by electoral laws whose consequence is to change election results (Davalos and Dong, 2011). The term "electoral rigging" refers to the ability of a candidate to engineer bogus vote-casting to win an election (Muhammad, 2012). The nature of electoral fraud is diverse and includes coercing voters at polling stations to cast ballots for a particular political party and filling ballot boxes with votes for any given political party. Furthermore, its nature encompasses procedural violations such as the late opening of polling stations and their early closing on polling days, or the failure to advertise their locations before election days (Lehoucq, 2003).
Politicians commit electoral fraud even when elections are not close at hand to discourage future electoral competition (Simpser, 2005). Electoral rigging can discourage honest voters from turning out to participate in the electoral process and ultimately to question the integrity of elections (Ansolabehere and Persily, 2007). According to Norris (2013b), electoral integrity refers to the set of universal resolutions and norms that are encompassed by the whole electoral cycle during the pre-electoral period, on polling day and in the post-polling period.
Collier and Vicente (2012) indicated that...