Manipulation of Who Can Vote

The last two rounds of parliamentary elections were also influenced by efforts to disenfranchise certain segments of the population likely to vote against Syrian-aligned candidates and extend Lebanese citizenship to Syrian and other Arab residents in the country who could be easily pressured to vote as desired. Lebanese citizens living abroad were denied the right to vote by absentee ballot, even though many have valid passports, own property, and periodically return to visit relatives. This decision surprised no one: the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who fled Beirut during the siege by Syrian forces in 1989-90 could not, of course, be relied upon to endorse candidates backed by Damascus.

Other methods of effectively disenfranchising voters were more subtle. For example, refugees who fled their homes during the war and live in other parts of Lebanon (mainly Beirut) were required to vote in their home districts. In 1992, the authorities set up special absentee polling booths in Beirut for refugees from the predominantly Druze districts of Shouf and Aley, but not for refugees from predominantly Christian districts.

Meanwhile, a 1994 naturalization decree extended Lebanese citizenship to approximately 300,000 foreign residents, most of them Syrians (increasing the country's official population by 10 percent). These newly-naturalized citizens played a major role in the 1996 elections, particularly in the Beqaa and the Akkar district of North Lebanon, where thousands were herded to the polls by government busses to vote for pro-Syrian candidates (according to one report, some of these "Lebanese citizens" had to be bussed in from their homes in the Syrian village of Zein Abidin).⁴

Intimidation, Extortion and Bribery of Voters

"It's a joke. It's not at all a free and fair election by any stretch of the imagination. The manipulations were so blatant . . . the worst Lebanon has seen''5 Paul Salem, director of the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections 9 September 1996

As illustrated above, the range of possible electoral outcomes is already heavily skewed in favor of Syrian-backed candidates well before the voting actually takes place. On election day, several additional factors converge to influence the results. The most important, overriding factor influencing the Lebanese voter is the fact that his/her vote can be observed by others. Whereas in most democratic countries the secret ballot is mandatory, in Lebanon it is more or less optional (voters are not required to go behind a curtain to place their votes). This distinction is critical. The reason it is mandatory in Western democracies is quite simple--in order to protect the voter from intimidation and bribery, it is necessary to deny him any means of making his choice publicly observable (even if he strongly wishes to do so).

Lebanese voters have no such protection. As a result, intimidation, extortion and vote-buying are rampant. In fact, they have become virtually institutionalized--political candidates are legally entitled to have a representative present at each polling station in their district and routinely instruct their "supporters" to cast their votes openly. For someone who has been paid or pressured to vote for a particular list, election day goes something like this: outside the polling station, the voter is handed a ballot with the list candidates already printed on it. He then waits in line and, under the careful gaze of security forces and representatives of this list, bypasses the curtain and drops his ballot into the box.

Since it is relatively easy to monitor people's voting behavior, powerful political figures can pressure their constituents in a variety of ways. In Lebanon, where government jobs are often obtained through contacts with political bosses rather than by merit (particularly at the municipal level), the bloated state bureaucracy obviously constitutes a massive pool of bought and sold voters. Newly naturalized Lebanese citizens constitute another large reserve of voters easily intimidated into voting for candidates backed by Damascus. Capitalizing on their memories of life in Syria, Interior Minister Michel Murr's cronies sent them scrambling to the polls in 1996 by suggesting that some of them may have obtained their citizenship "by mistake."

One vote that Hariri didn't pay for in 1996

Many Lebanese, especially the poor, are readily willing to sell their votes to the highest bidder. During the 1996 parliamentary elections in Beirut, a Reuters reporter witnessed supporters of then prime minister Rafiq Hariri paying voters $64 apiece to vote for Hariri's list of candidates.⁶ In light of the country's dismal economic crisis and soaring unemployment rate, the number of Lebanese willing to sell their votes will skyrocket in this month's elections.

Not everyone with the financial means to buy votes can do so, however--this is where Syrian backing becomes a critical element in the equation. In both the 1992 and 1996 elections, representatives of opposition candidates were routinely kicked out of polling centers or arrested by security forces--independent candidates cannot reliably buy votes if they have no observers present at the polls.

In addition to the routine extortion and bribery of individual voters, political candidates who have risen to positions of power in the Lebanese government (all of whom did so with the explicit backing of Syria) have proven adept at using their control over the distribution of state funds and services to intimidate entire villages and municipalities into voting en masse for a given candidate by threatening or bribing local municipal leaders (mukhtars). "Certain officials are summoning mukhtars of towns and villages and asking them to coerce voters to cast a specific number of ballots in specific boxes," Maronite Patriarch Boutros Sfeir complained during a Sunday sermon from his summer residence in Diman last month.⁷ This method of intimidation is particularly effective in rural areas, where the cutoff of government services and utilities by powerful regime figures spurned at the polls can potentially be devastating to the well-being of the population.

More generally, all voters in Lebanon are subject to an atmosphere of tension and anxiety on election day stemming from the Syrian occupation itself. In addition to the 35-40,000 Syrian soldiers stationed in Lebanon, thousands of ununiformed Syrian intelligence agents roam the country at will. Whether or not they are actually present inside the polls is unclear, but many Lebanese certainly believe that they are and act accordingly. The heavy (and technically illegal) presence of Lebanese security forces inside polling stations reinforces this sense of trepidation

Falsification of Electoral Votes

By the time election day arrives, blatant vote-rigging is not usually necessary to ensure that Syrian-backed candidates sweep the elections. In hotly contested districts, though, such measures have not been uncommon. Few were surprised when two electrical outages mysteriously interrupted the 1996 elections in South Metn--the head of the victorious list in this district was none other than Electricity Minister Elie Hobeiqa, a former militia leader and staunch ally of Syria. Most Lebanese presumed that the power in Jounieh had been cut in order to "allow ballot-stuffing to occur under cover of darkness."¹⁰

Official figures regarding the percentage of registered voters taking part in the elections are widely believed to be grossly inflated by the government in order to bolster the perceived legitimacy of the results. During the 1996 elections in the Beqaa, when late afternoon press reports estimated the participation rate at around 13%, Murr arbitrarily extended the voting hours from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. and afterwards announced that voter turnout had surged to 52%.