The inquiry into ten years of disputed local elections was expected to find fraud. It found something more troubling: a system that functioned almost exactly as designed, and an electorate that had stopped believing it could.
Across four hundred contested results, the inquiry identified a handful of genuine administrative errors and no evidence of coordinated fraud. The counts were, overwhelmingly, correct. What had collapsed was not the machinery but the trust — the shared assumption that a losing result is a loss rather than a theft.
That collapse, the inquiry warns, is harder to repair than any procedural fault. You can recount a ballot. You cannot recount confidence. The report's central recommendation is not a new safeguard but an old and difficult one: transparency so complete that disbelief becomes effortful. Whether that is achievable in the current climate, the authors admit, they do not know.
