Belarus Re-Elects Lukashenko
On March 19th President Alexander Lukashenko will provide voters with the opportunity to decide how wide a margin he will receive in the elections he provides to prove that he is a modern dictator.
Lukashenko believes in the freedom of the press, as well as the rack, the iron maiden, hot pokers and other things that are outlawed in the West.
When it comes to the media:
The Committee to Protect Journalists has described Belarus as one of the 10 “worst places to be a journalist”. President Lukashenko appears on the Reporters Without Borders organisation’s list of “predators of press freedom”; it accuses his government of carrying out a “systematic crackdown” on the private press.
To improve the experience of people voting for him, Lukashenko has rejected election monitors who intended to watch while people counted ballots and other unnecessary annoyances.
Belarus was considering using electronic voting, but that would waste all of the pre-marked ballots currently in storage.
The President is getting a little jumpy having to wait until this Sunday to learn the margin of his victory.
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[…] As predicted, Lukashchenko was reelected in a process that no one believes was free or fair. There are a lot of people in rural areas who haven’t quite accepted the fact that they are no longer in the Soviet Union and would have automatically voted for the current officials because that is what they had always done, and it is possible that Lukashchenko could have won if the election had been free, but he didn’t want to chance it. […]