Voter Suppression Goes Global, with Elizabeth Iams Wellman

This is a conversation about the politics of voting from abroad: in particular, about how governments manipulate emigrants’ access to the ballot in order to protect their own hold on power.

For the most part, elections are events that happen inside a country, as resident citizens cast ballots at local polling stations. However, around the world, about 281 million people live outside the country in which they were born, and a majority of countries give their emigrant citizens the legal right to vote.

The numbers here are not trivial. While exact figures are hard to come by, there are 80 countries around the world that both recognize voting rights for citizens abroad and have emigrant populations that add up to 5% or more of the national population. For countries with competitive elections, emigrant citizens represent a potentially critical voting bloc living outside the country.

Potentially is the key word here, though. For many of these citizens, the right to vote is only hypothetical because their governments often do little to make it practically feasible for them to cast a ballot. While a country like Senegal sets up 750 polling stations around the world, Kenya sets up only 5.

Our guest today, Dr. Elizabeth Iams Wellman, contends that that is no accident. She argues that incumbents strategically suppress -- or expand -- the vote from abroad to suit their electoral needs. A Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Williams College, Beth has recently published two articles on the topic, in the American Political Science Review and African Affairs, and is at work on a book project titled The Diaspora Vote Dilemma.

We talk with Beth about the often-hidden politics of emigrant enfranchisement. She tells us about the places where the vote from abroad has decided elections, such as Italy, Moldova, Romania, and Cape Verde. But we also discuss the tools that governments use to make sure that emigrant voters can’t sway elections -- tools such as limiting polling locations and enforcing strict voter ID laws.

Beth also tells us about her research process, including how she addressed a set of interesting measurement challenges -- such as, how to capture the electoral threat posed by the vote from abroad -- so that she could test her argument statistically for a large set of elections in sub-Saharan Africa. But she also highlights how her qualitative analysis of individual cases revealed competitive dynamics and strategic mechanisms that she could never have extracted from a regression model. And at a time in which most comparativists have found themselves unable to travel for fieldwork, we were intrigued by the remote interviewing that Beth did alongside months of on-the-ground research, and we ask her about her experience with conducting research interviews via video call.

You can find references to all the academic works we discuss on the episode page on our website.