The Briefing Room
General Category => World News => Topic started by: jmyrlefuller on October 10, 2013, 12:20:53 pm
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/09/oops-azerbaijan-released-election-results-before-voting-had-even-started/
by Max Fisher
October 9, 2013
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.
In second place was opposition candidate Jamil Hasanli with 7.4 percent of the vote. Hasanli had recently appealed to the Central Election Commission for paid airtime on state TV, arguing that Aliyev gets heavy airtime and the opposition does not. He was denied.
The data were quickly recalled. The official story is that the app's developer had mistakenly sent out the 2008 election results as part of a test. But that's a bit flimsy, given that the released totals show the candidates from this week, not from 2008.
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.
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If Jimmaaaaaah Caaaaaaaaata had been there monitoring, this would have never happened by golly! :woohoo:
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Sounds exactly like the 2012 re-election of the America hater.
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Thank God things like this could never happen in the good-old U.S.A. :patriot:
/s
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Thank God things like this could never happen in the good-old U.S.A. :patriot:
/s
I don't think it even matters who wins anymore. Corporations fund and control both parties now.
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I don't think it even matters who wins anymore. Corporations fund and control both parties now.
Yes, it matters. And we're about to find out just how much.
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I don't think it even matters who wins anymore. Corporations fund and control both parties now.
You think it is just corporations that fund the Democrats (for instance). Try Sierra Club, River Keepers, Tides, Soros, Buffett, all the abortion promoting organizations, unions - SEIU and Teamsters and Teachers unions being the biggest........ compared to them the money the GOP receives thanks to Citizens United is a mere pittance. .. but this is all what led to the formation of the tea party and taking our country back from special interests.
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You think it is just corporations that fund the Democrats (for instance). Try Sierra Club, River Keepers, Tides, Soros, Buffett, all the abortion promoting organizations, unions - SEIU and Teamsters and Teachers unions being the biggest........ compared to them the money the GOP receives thanks to Citizens United is a mere pittance. .. but this is all what led to the formation of the tea party and taking our country back from special interests.
The big problem is the system is so entrenched that the TEA Party may have been formed too late. The only real way of taking the country back is to use the same tactics the progressives used to jack it in the first place. Start local and build up slowly. If you get the chance, sabotage the opposition.
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Most of these election result 'released' stories are really just news outlets setting up their tickers and graphics and putting in dummy data. There is always some employee who think he'll get a kick out of trolling the internet by taking a photo or something gets accidentally put on the wrong monitor.