Azerbaijan declares election winner, before election takes place

The Washington Post reports that the Azerbaijan Central Election Commission accidentally released, via a smartphone app, the results of the country's presidential election a day before the election took place. Oops. The commission is saying that the app's developer accidentally sent out the 2008 election results as a test. But no one is believing this since a) the results show candidates from this year, not 2008; and b) it's Azerbaijan, and everyone assumes the election there is totally rigged.

This seems to deserve a place in the annals of outrageous election fraud, alongside such classics as the 1927 election in Liberia, in which Charles King was elected president with 240,000 votes cast for him, in a population with only 15,000 registered voters.

As Stalin maybe said (or maybe didn't), "It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes."

---