2024 Elections Recap - The World Voted

The first in a three-part series about what happened in this historic year of elections

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

It’s hard to believe that the end of 2024 is almost here. Some days were long, but not surprisingly, the months flew by.

I’ve struggled with where to start this recap of an epic year. I have pages and pages of notes about the things that happened. Personally, professionally, as a country, and globally, we’ve witnessed a lot of change and plot twists.

This is my attempt not necessarily to make sense of it all but to pull together the common themes and nuggets of things to keep an eye on.

I’m going to do it in three parts. Today, we’ll look at what happened (and is still happening) around the globe. We still have elections in Romania (which have turned into quite a mess), Ghana, Senegal, Chad, and Croatia.

Next week, I’ll focus on the United States, and then on December 18th, we’ll examine the tech world specifically.

I’m sorry this is so long, but a lot happened. I am also only barely scratching the surface of what happened. Let me know in the comments or by replying to this email what I missed or your takeaways!

Global Elections in 2024

Ahead of election years, it’s hard to predict precisely how many elections there will be. I wrote a piece about this in late 2023 to explain why so many different numbers were going around about how many elections there would be and how many people would be voting. Regardless of how you counted it, everyone agreed it was a historic year of elections, and according to the Economist, four billion people - or more than half the world’s population - would be affected by these elections.

This was Foreign Policy’s cover story, in which they discussed a sense of foreboding in the air. They feared democracy was going to die due to a rise in populism and a combination of misinformation and artificial intelligence.

Needless to say, we were on edge going into 2024. Did we need to be as anxious as we were? Probably not, but I think we panicked responsibly for the most part.

Let’s start with the numbers. I asked Anna to do an update on how many elections will have happened this year, and we are potentially looking at 93 elections (with ten runoffs) in 77 countries. There are two countries, four elections, and one runoff left. One of those is Guinea Bissau, which doesn’t even have a date set yet, so it is unlikely, but the others will likely happen. I took all of that into account in the number. It’s about what we predicted at the beginning of the year: 83 elections in 78 countries. We even had a few snap elections—especially those in France and Japan—that we weren’t expecting.

Let’s look at some of the more significant elections this year, not including the United States. I want to create a chart looking at every election and what we saw in it, but that will take more time to pull together.

1. Taiwan - January 13, 2024. Taiwan is one of the only elections this year that did not entirely fall into the anti-incumbency trend we saw elsewhere worldwide. Despite thousands of election interference cases opened by authorities and intense Chinese pressure, voters chose to keep the Democratic Progressive Party in power, albeit with a new leader in Lai Ching-t,e as Tsai Ing-wen was ineligible to run after serving two terms. Taiwan continues to be an example of how to build up strong defenses against disinformation.

2. Indonesia - February 14, 2024. Indonesia also saw a change in leadership as their current president, Joko Widodo, could not run again. He broke from his party to support Prabowo Subianto for the presidency, the candidate who ultimately won. What stands out to me the most about this election is how much the campaigns used AI to reach voters - especially to rebrand the right-wing Prabowo as more relatable and grandfatherly, which received some criticism for trying to cover up some of his past human rights abuse actions.

3. South Korea - April 10, 2024. This was a legislative or mid-term election for the country, so while President Yoon Suk-yeol of the People Power Party wasn’t himself on the ballot, his party and his policies were. Yoon and the People Power Party saw significant losses that weren’t enough to threaten him with impeachment but were sufficient to give more power to the opposition parties in the legislature. We saw that in action this week when Yoon tried to declare martial law and the parliament overturned it. The use of AI and deepfakes was a concern in the election, with 129 instances found by the Electoral Commission. Some say other countries can learn from South Korea's measures to debunk and ban deepfakes before the polls.

4. India - April 19 - June 1, 2024. Narendra Modi won a third term as India’s prime minister in the country’s largest-ever election. Still, it was a much closer election than anticipated, with the INDIA block of opposition parties gaining more seats than expected. There’s so much to unpack from this election, but focusing on the technology component, the information environment was all over the place. AI was used nefariously to create deepfakes of people looking to be campaigning for one party and had not. This was another election where we saw wide use of AI by campaigns in non-nefarious ways as well, including, according to Tech Policy Press, “The use of AI in personalizing voice calls by political campaigns or live voice translations of speeches in regional languages were clear examples of the use of technology to make political messaging more effective.” Tech Policy Press notes YouTube's massive role as a spot for many voters to turn to for information.

5. South Africa - May 29, 2024. After having a parliamentary majority since 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) lost it, requiring them to form a coalition to govern. Tessa Knight at the University of Texas at Austin's Center for Media Engagement has an excellent overview of technology in this election, including that most misleading content was created using more traditional tactics versus AI, and X was where most of it spread. Her one important but underreported finding is the potential for AI-generated audio to spread on encrypted apps like WhatsApp.

6. Mexico - June 2, 2024. Mexico elected its first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum. Sheinbaum came from the same party as Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and won in a landslide. This election was marred by concerns as AMLO tried to reduce the power of the Electoral Commission (INE). Violence against journalists was a huge concern, with AMLO himself sharing the number of a reporter on a live stream and asking people to call and complain about coverage (a favorite example I like to use in classes where I ask students how they would handle a case like this).

7. European Union - June 6-9, 2024. According to Wikipedia, “The European People's Party led by Ursula von der Leyen won the most seats in the European Parliament. The pro-EU centrist, liberal, social democrat and environmentalist parties suffered losses, while anti-EU right-wing populist parties made gains.” The biggest tech story out of this election isn’t actually how technology was used at all, but rather the hoops the tech companies had to jump through to comply with regulation (often meaning they couldn’t spend as much time on higher priority elections, but I’ll cover that in the tech overview on December 18) as well as the fact that the commissioners focusing on tech - Margrethe Vestager, Věra Jourová and Thierry Breton - all departing (Breton having resigned after the election in a row with von der Leyen).

8. France - June 30 and July 7, 2024. Perhaps one of the most significant impacts of the European Union elections was the results forcing France into a snap election with dramatic twists and turns when Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party made substantial gains in the EU elections and again in the first round of the snap election. The more centrist parties rallied for the second round to ensure the far-right didn’t get a majority. Still, the legislature has been chaotic since then, with another no-confidence vote on the horizon that could mean significant things for the financial markets. Macron can’t call another snap election until one year after the last one, and he cannot run again in the 2027 presidential election. If he were to step down early, a presidential election would have to happen within 20 to 35 days of that happening (and people are complaining about Harris not having enough time in the US to campaign!). Lots of drama continues unfolding in France, which is worth watching. On the tech end of it all, France arrested the Telegram CEO in August for criminal activities on his platform (unrelated to the elections), and the National Rally used AI as part of its campaigning.

9. United Kingdom - July 4, 2024. Many expected the United Kingdom to go to the polls later in 2024, but they shocked everyone by calling them this summer. The ruling Conservative Party was destroyed, with the Labour Party gaining a majority and Keir Starmer becoming Prime Minister. I can’t find much about tech’s impact on the election beyond the usual concerns about the role AI might play.

10. Japan - October 27, 2024. Japan was thrown into a snap election following the resignation of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida following a slush fund scandal. According to Wikipedia, “Amid continued public discontent with the slush fund scandal, the governing LDP and its coalition partner Komeito lost their parliamentary majority in the lower house for the first time since 2009, with the LDP suffering its second-worst result in its history, securing only 191 seats.” It’s a rare upheaval for a country that is a democracy but has had only one governing party for the last seven decades.

11. Romania - November 24 and December 8, 2024. Romania is a last-minute entry to the must-watch list as chaos has engulfed the country after Calin Georgescu - a relatively unknown candidate who mostly campaigned via TikTok videos - came in first place in the first round. It’s going to be a second round, but the courts are doing recounts to decide whether or not to do a re-run. Members of the European Parliament called the TikTok CEO in to testify about the company’s role in this shock result. Keep an eye on what is happening here.

I also wanted to call out an interesting use of AI in another election this year: Imran Khan used AI to declare victory from jail as he had no other way of addressing his supporters. We also saw an AI candidate in the Belarus elections, with the opposition saying, at least he can’t be arrested!

What themes come up across all of these?

1. Incumbents are not wanted. In every single election, we either got a new leader or the incumbent saw massive losses (even if they hung on). This is a new world order, and we don’t fully know how it will play out over the next few years (especially with Trump winning in the U.S.).

2. The U.S. did suck up a lot of oxygen. I feel bad. I keep a close eye on all of these elections, and I even learned a few things while making this recap because I was so focused on the US starting this summer. We must watch what is happening globally and how that can impact us in the United States.

3. AI not as bad as feared. There were lots of examples of AI being used, but overall, the massive concerns people had did not materialize. That doesn’t mean this can’t happen in the future, but it wasn’t as bad as expected.

4. More AI use by campaigns. Candidates and parties used AI more than we saw in the United States. This was for two reasons. One, there wasn’t as much negative press attention to its use in these places, so campaigns felt more comfortable using it. Two, the AI companies weren’t putting as many resources into monitoring and enforcing their AI policies around the globe, so the candidates had more access to the tools.

5. Information ecosystem of influencers and podcasters is not as caught up to the United States (but it’s getting there. See Romania.). India probably used influencers the most outside of the United States, and podcasts aren’t as popular overseas. However, I suspect that the amount of attention being paid to the role of these in the U.S. election will cause international campaigns to look to these mediums more - especially in places like Canada, Germany, and Australia next year.

After spending nearly four hours pulling all of this together, my main takeaway is how much geopolitics will change after this year. So many new or weakened leaders mean changes in how these countries interact. Of the G7, four countries elected new leaders this year, and two more (Germany and Canada) are going to the polls next year. How this will change will need to be another topic for another time.

My other takeaway is how much more international campaigns used AI to reach voters. There were some innovative uses that I think we’ll see adopted here in the U.S. for the midterms and 2028. The Conversation has a good piece outlining some of these.

As I mentioned at the top I will be doing a deeper dive into tech’s role in all of this in my December 18th newsletter, but I did want to flag that Meta released a blog post yesterday outlining what it saw on its platform during this year of elections.

I’m sure I missed stuff. Please let me know in the comments what else we need to know as we analyze this. Next week, I’ll cover the U.S. election.

Please support the curation and analysis I’m doing with this newsletter. As a paid subscriber, you make it possible for me to bring you in-depth analyses of the most pressing issues in tech and politics.