Oops: Azerbaijan released election results before voting had even started

One has to at least appreciate Russia for keeping a lid on who was chosen before elected until the right time.

Azerbaijan’s big presidential election, held on Wednesday, was anticipated to be neither free nor fair. President Ilham Aliyev, who took over from his father 10 years ago, has stepped up intimidation of activists and journalists. Rights groups are complaining about free speech restrictions and one-sided state media coverage. The BBC’s headline for its story on the election reads “The Pre-Determined President.” So expectations were pretty low.

Even still, one expects a certain ritual in these sorts of authoritarian elections, a fealty to at least the appearance of democracy, if not democracy itself. So it was a bit awkward when Azerbaijan’s election authorities released vote results – a full day before voting had even started.

The vote counts – spoiler alert: Aliyev was shown as winning by a landslide – were pushed out on an official smartphone app run by the Central Election Commission. It showed Aliyev as “winning” with 72.76 percent of the vote. That’s on track with his official vote counts in previous elections: he won (“won”?) 76.84 percent of the vote in 2003 and 87 percent in 2008.

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You might call this a sort of Kinsley gaffe on a national scale. (A Kinsley gaffe, named for journalist Michael Kinsley, is when a politician gets in trouble for saying something that’s widely known as true but that he isn’t supposed to say.) There’s supposed to be a certain ritual to an election like Azerbaijan’s: demonstrations are put down, reporters are harassed, opposition candidates are whittled down, supporters are ushered to the polls and then Aliyev’s sweeping victory is announced. They got the order wrong here.

As of this writing, Azerbaijan’s election authorities say they’ve counted 80 percent of the ballots, with Aliyev winning just under 85 percent of the vote so far. He’s been officially reelected.

Full article: Oops: Azerbaijan released election results before voting had even started (Washington Post)