Hijacking the Vote: Inside Bangladesh’s Data-Driven Election Manipulation

This policy brief examines how Bangladesh’s electoral integrity is increasingly shaped and strained by the growing centrality of digital infrastructure across the electoral lifecycle. Drawing on a decade-long electoral and institutional context, statistical analysis of the 2024 parliamentary elections, and documented governance gaps, it contextualises the electoral landscape under previous administrations and identifies recurring anomaly patterns that point to systemic vulnerabilities and coordinated manipulation risks. While the brief does not seek to establish direct causality between these vulnerabilities and specific electoral outcomes, it maps how weaknesses in national identity systems, postal voting workflows, centralised results management platforms, and election-related surveillance create structural fault lines that may be exploited to influence outcomes while preserving the procedural and arithmetic consistency of officially reported results. Its objective is not to relitigate past elections, but to provide the Bangladesh Election Commission (BEC) with concrete, actionable recommendations to strengthen transparency, accountability, and public confidence in upcoming and future elections by addressing these risks at their structural and technological roots.