> Dictators [...] can stay in power without lying about the vote count by, say, deciding what makes it on the ballot in the first place.
Reminds me of the situation in Hong Kong. Concerning the Chief Executive elections since 2017, there was a reform proposal in 2015 [1] to:
1. allow universal suffrage in Hong Kong, but
2. Beijing effectively could screen candidates.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-32397179
Strongly opposed as “fake democracy”, the proposal eventually did not go through (due to a very silly technical error from pro-Beijing side).
The rest is history.
After lots of subsequent development, just this week there was a mass arrest of pro-democracy lawmakers and activists [2], for otherwise the pro-democracy camp may have enough say in the election of the next Chief Executive, after the landslide victory in the district council election of 2019.
Poll workers for instance, get drafted from a lottery right near the election instead of a voluntary system so there's no way a team of confederates could scheme behind the scenes.
There's also multiple tabulating and verification steps. The ballots are both machine and hand counted. The people and machines are chosen at random and nobody could rig all the machines because nobody has access to all of them. Nobody can coordinate an effort for subordinates to rig them because again, the teams are formed via a random draft.
Test ballots get fed through the machines by teams of observers who get randomly assigned to polling stations for surprise inspections.
Furthermore the top 6 candidates independently verify the tally. They each get essentially an open book of the records. Statistical spot check surveys are done as a further confirmation etc. There's lots of international observers, etc
Every voter gets a copy of the ballot and a confirmation number that they can go and check the record of.
Maybe someone else can find a place where corruption in the tabulation could occur but it looks pretty airtight to me
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Venezuela#Polling...
* - It's worth noting I'm not saying anything about the outcome of the elections or the politics. Voter intimidation and disinformation could still happen, lots of objectionable things. But their tabulation of votes seems to be pretty clean. Dictators, if that's your opinion here, can stay in power without lying about the vote count by, say, deciding what makes it on the ballot in the first place. For an extreme example, this election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_German_parliamentary_elec... could have been exemplary - as clean as mathematically possible, and had the same outcome.