The Washington Post compares dictatorial Azerbaijan with North Korea

YEREVAN, JULY 24, ARMENPRESS: The Washington Post wrote an article about the election fraud of dictatorial regimes in the world, writing also about the Azerbaijani elections. Armenpress reports that The Post starts the article with “the time Azerbaijan released its election results before voting started”, adding that “in a world of absurd election results, North Korea is in good company”. In perhaps the most memorable election gaffe in recent memory, a mobile app used in 2013 by Azerbaijan’s election commission published the results a day before voting even began. The president, Ilham Aliyev, was said to winmore than 72 percent of ballots; an opposition candidatetook second place with nearly a tenth of that. As The Postreported, the app’s developer chalked the error up to a test version being sent out with data from years earlier, though that didn’t quite explain why the names of current candidates were included. Later, the government acknowledged the mishap, saying it showed "hypothetical results from one small electoral district." Aliyev got his third term.

Local elections in North Korea over the weekend went just about as expected. State-run Korean Central News Agencyreportedthat 99.97 percent of voters participated in Sunday’s ballot, which is held every few years and essentially involves predetermined candidates who are rubber-stamped into office. Any lingering curiosity about the remaining .03 percent quickly evaporates, as the agency acknowledged that they were "on foreign tour or working in oceans" at the time. If that feels, well, unbelievable, in a world of strongmen and staged elections, think back tothese past examples. (Yes, North Korea makes an appearance).

Officials in the predominantlyMuslim former Soviet republicannouncedin April that President Nursultan Nazarbayev won a fifth term. He took about 98percent of the vote in an election that the government said hadturnout around95 percent. (In 2011, Nazarbayevtook95.5 percent.) The next day, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which monitored the ballot,said“voters were not offered a genuine choice between political alternatives.” Nazarbayev, who has led the Central Asia nation since 1989, sincerely slammed his critics. “I apologize if these numbers are unacceptable for the super democratic countries, but there was nothing I could do,” hesaid in televised remarks from the capital, Astana. “If I had interfered, it would have been undemocratic.” In May 2014, less than a year after a military takeoverswept Egypt’s first democratically elected president from power, the man who ledthe about-face was poised to be his successor.

Abdel Fatah al-Sissi was the undeniable front-runner going into the two-day vote, which had been boycotted by the Muslim Brotherhood, the party of ousted Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi. But turnout was widely reported to be low, and so officials added a third day. Some cited political disillusionment as the cause; officials blameda heatwave. When all was said and done, it was a landslide for Sissi. As for his opponent, Hamdeen Sabahi, theNew York Timessummedit up best: "He finished basically tied with the number of ballots that had been defaced to protest what critics called the undemocratic climate and limited choices." International observersquicklycriticized the extra day, which was objected to by both candidates. Monitors from the E.U.saidit "caused unnecessary uncertainty in the electoral process."