Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

What can the U.S. learn from Argentina’s elections?

A voter submits a ballot in the Nov. 19, 2023, Argentinean election.​

A voter submits a ballot in the Nov. 19, 2023, Argentinean election.

Ricardo Rubio/Europa Press via Getty Images

Levine is the senior elections integrity fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy. Batista is a project assistant at The Carter Center.

In 2024, more voters will head to the polls than ever before across the world and in the United States. However, elections by themselves do not guarantee democracy, and as the 2024 presidential elections heats up, it’s important that the U.S. consider other countries’ recent elections to help inform its preparations for November.

Last August, we went to Buenos Aires to observe the Argentina’s simultaneous and mandatory open primaries (PASO) as part of an international visitor’s delegation hosted by Electoral Transparency and the American Conference of Subnational Election Authorities, and we both continued to monitor Argentina’s general and runoff elections in October and November.


We saw uneasy Argentineans voting amid a bleak economic situation, setting the stage for a high-stakes fight between Sergio Massa, an incumbent minister presiding over high inflation, and Javier Milei, a libertarian who furiously denounced political elites with fiery, profanity-laden language. Milei proposed drastic economic reforms that would overhaul the role of government in Argentinian society. Although he baselessly cast doubt on Argentina’s electoral system, Milei won the polarized and divisive contest.

The deeply polarized context provides two sets of lessons for the U.S. and other onlookers holding elections this year: the first on electoral reform implementation, the second on artificial intelligence.

First, electoral officials must develop contingency plans when significantly changing election processes, even if the changes alter a highly criticized procedure. This happened in Argentina when the city of Buenos Aires’s electoral management body decided to have its voters cast their ballots on voting machines for local elections in August 2023. For decades, Buenos Aires voters had been using a political party ballots system to vote in both local and national elections. In the party ballots system, voters enter a “dark room” ( cuarto oscuro), pick the party ballot they would like to vote for and then put it in an envelope that they place into a cardboard box. This instrument has been targeted by substantial criticism from electoral experts, as it opens several opportunities for fraud (e.g., stealing of party ballots by voters) and puts too much burden on parties to monitor their ballots in polling centers throughout the country.

In its federalist system, Argentina’s provincial electoral management bodies have the discretion to determine the dates of local elections and the voting instrument(s) to be used in them. The autonomous city of Buenos Aires decided to keep its PASO on the same date as the national primary and pilot a different voting instrument, a new voting machine, for its local elections to improve ballot secrecy. As a result, Buenos Aires voters voted in two concurrent elections on the same day and had to use two different instruments for each of the elections: a new voting machine they had never used before for the local election, and a hand-marked paper ballot to vote for the national election.

The above situation generated significant confusion and discomfort on Election Day. Big lines were reported in voting locations across the city as voters voted on these machines for the first time. The procedure for voting in the two systems was also not implemented uniformly at all stations. Buenos Aires’s electoral management body (EMB) trained its officials to allow two voters to vote at the same time on different instruments. However, on Election Day, a national electoral judge denounced the long lines and stated that parallel voting by different voters at the same time was not permitted. She also raised questions about the security and legality of the electronic voting adopted by the city.

At least two other lessons were also learned from Buenos Aires’s pilot with the new voting system. One, electoral officials must develop a crisis communication strategy to respond to mistakes or unexpected outcomes arising from electoral reforms. But more importantly, election officials should also conduct dry runs of the voting process when significant changes to procedures are made before Election Day to help potentially identify and anticipate some of the issues that could occur during the voting. Even though the local EMB conducted many trainings on the use of the new voting machines, it did not appear to adequately consider how voters would handle voting in two different elections with different voting instruments.

In addition to electoral reform, AI impacted Argentina’s 2023 elections and are affecting U.S. presidential candidates from both major political parties. In Argentina’s presidential runoff campaign, Massa’s and Milei’s campaigns used AI-generated images to exalt themselves (Massa was a superhero; Milei was a lion) or portray their opponents in cartoonish stereotyped images (Massa as an old communist general; Milei as a Margaret Thatcher supporter during the Falklands war).

Deep fake videos using the candidates’ faces were circulated widely. One notable example was a video featuring an inebriated man implying drug use, onto which Massa’s face was superimposed. Although the video was eventually removed from social media platforms, its extensive reach prior to deletion and its proliferation on messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram render its impact on voters difficult to quantify.

AI introduces a novel and complex dimension to the twin challenges of combating election mis- and disinformation and protecting electoral infrastructure from cyberattacks. The enhanced persuasiveness of fake images, voices and videos exacerbates information pollution, particularly given some voters' propensity to embrace narratives that reinforce their existing beliefs. Election officials and social media platforms must collaboratively address this issue, with the latter vigilantly monitoring the content they host. Implementing measures to tag and identify AI-generated content is an urgent first step the platforms could take toward a cooperative effort with electoral authorities to ensure transparency. Election officials should also incorporate AI risk into training and election planning, double down on cybersecurity, and consider how to leverage AI and new technologies to help improve the administration of future elections.

It is increasingly important for AI companies to implement measures to prevent their technology from being used to pollute the information environment during electoral campaigns. OpenAI, one of the leading AI companies in the market, recently released policies that other AI companies should consider, including not allowing the creation of chatbots that impersonate people or institutions, not allowing the production of information that deters people from participating in elections, and the development of a tool for detecting images generated by their AI image generator, DALL-E. While the effectiveness of these measures is yet to be tested, other generative AI companies must follow their lead in developing guidelines and efforts to protect the information environment from malicious use of their technology.

As the U.S. gears up for its most consequential election in recent memory, it needs to stay abreast of foreseeable changes faced by other countries in conducting their own elections. Whether that’s Buenos Aires’s challenging voting machine pilot in its PASO or the prominent role of artificial intelligence in shaping Argentina’s electoral narratives throughout 2023. Incorporating lessons from examples like these could be the difference between whether the U.S. conducts a 2024 election that is perceived as legitimate or stolen by large segments of its electorate.

Read More

An oversized ballot box surrounded by people.

Young people worldwide form new parties to reshape politics—yet America’s two-party system blocks them.

Getty Images, J Studios

No Country for Young Politicians—and How To Fix That

In democracies around the world, young people have started new political parties whenever the establishment has sidelined their views or excluded them from policymaking. These parties have sometimes reinvigorated political competition, compelled established parties to take previously neglected issues seriously, or encouraged incumbent leaders to find better ways to include and reach out to young voters.

In Europe, a trio in their twenties started Volt in 2017 as a pan-European response to Brexit, and the party has managed to win seats in the European Parliament and in some national legislatures. In Germany, young people concerned about climate change created Klimaliste, a party committed to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as per the Paris Agreement. Although the party hasn’t won seats at the federal level, they have managed to win some municipal elections. In Chile, leaders of the 2011 student protests, who then won seats as independent candidates, created political parties like Revolución Democrática and Convergencia Social to institutionalize their movements. In 2022, one of these former student leaders, Gabriel Boric, became the president of Chile at 36 years old.

Keep ReadingShow less
How To Fix Gerrymandering: A Fair-Share Rule for Congressional Redistricting

Demonstrators gather outside of The United States Supreme Court during an oral arguments in Gill v. Whitford to call for an end to partisan gerrymandering on October 3, 2017 in Washington, DC

Getty Images, Olivier Douliery

How To Fix Gerrymandering: A Fair-Share Rule for Congressional Redistricting

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground. ~ Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Col. Edward Carrington, Paris, 27 May 1788

The Problem We Face

The U.S. House of Representatives was designed as the chamber of Congress most directly tethered to the people. Article I of the Constitution mandates that seats be apportioned among the states according to population and that members face election every two years—design features meant to keep representatives responsive to shifting public sentiment. Unlike the Senate, which prioritizes state sovereignty and representation, the House translates raw population counts into political voice: each House district is to contain roughly the same number of residents, ensuring that every citizen’s vote carries comparable weight. In principle, then, the House serves as the nation’s demographic mirror, channeling the diverse preferences of the electorate into lawmaking and acting as a safeguard against unresponsive or oligarchic governance.

Nationally, the mismatch between the overall popular vote and the partisan split in House seats is small, with less than a 1% tilt. But state-level results tell a different story. Take Connecticut: Democrats hold all five seats despite Republicans winning over 40% of the statewide vote. In Oklahoma, the inverse occurs—Republicans control every seat even though Democrats consistently earn around 40% of the vote.

Keep ReadingShow less
"Vote Here" sign
Voters head to the polls in Minneapolis, one of five Minnesota cities that used ranked-choice voting on Tuesday.
Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Trump Targets Voting Rights and Suppresses Voting

This essay is part of a series by Lawyers Defending American Democracy where we demonstrate the link between the administration’s sweeping executive actions and their roots in the authoritarian blueprint Project 2025, and show how these actions harm individuals and families throughout the country.

Two months into his second term, President Trump began attacking the most important pillar of our democracy: free and fair elections.

Keep ReadingShow less
Once Again, Politicians Are Choosing Their Voters. It’s Time for Voters To Choose Back.
A pile of political buttons sitting on top of a table

Once Again, Politicians Are Choosing Their Voters. It’s Time for Voters To Choose Back.

Once again, politicians are trying to choose their voters to guarantee their own victories before the first ballot is cast.

In the latest round of redistricting wars, Texas Republicans are attempting a rare mid-decade redistricting to boost their advantage ahead of the 2026 midterms, and Democratic governors in California and New York are signaling they’re ready to “fight fire with fire” with their own partisan gerrymanders.

Keep ReadingShow less