Transition democracies: Escape hatch on the ballot box?
Yesterday, RFE/RL posted a great article on “Securing an Outcome” which explains a lot about how elections can be skewed and “unfree” by Western democratic standards. Most of them are reminiscent of Tammany Hall New York: the use of patronage to buy votes/ensure loyalty, stuffing ballot boxes, absentee votes, registering dead people as live voters, and so forth. In all of vast Russia tomorrow, only 280 election monitors will be present. It’s not enough.
Last month, I attended a talk at the Wilson Center on “Russia and the United States in Eurasia“. The speaker, Nikolai Zlobin, noted that Russia’s Mr. Putin was under some sub rosa diplomatic pressure to run again from leaders of other transition states: because his observance of term limits jeopardized the non-observance of those limits in other places. We should not forget that besides the obvious retention of power issues, there are other concerns: Russia’s internal stability , and stability in Central Asia, remains a top priority. Whether stability is furthered by keeping dictators on, however, might be a mix of reality and perception.
Questions of manipulated perception and election criminality also concern us this week with Uzbekistan. RFE/RL also reported an official poll in Uzbekistan that says people are satisfied with the opportunities and governance in their state. Oh, sure: that would be that over-one-year delayed election with an unfree press most of the time and a press blackout right now–a large number of young people emigrating for economic purposes to Russia and Kazakhstan . . . and yet, these polls, fictional or not, may help Mr. Karimov reassure voters whose apathy must be extreme–or whose anger is too dangerous to show.
Further reading:
A history, hardly complete, at Wikipedia: electoral fraud
Photo: Election.ca–A canadian ballot box; and, irregulartimes.com