But it’s okay because our appointed puppet ruler, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, was the one who did it:
KABUL, Afghanistan — Detailed polling records released by an Afghanistan election commission reveal numerous polling places in Kandahar Province where all the votes were delivered to a single candidate — incumbent President Hamid Karzai. […]
Also in Kandahar Province, an area that was a target of insurgent attacks to try to suppress the vote, there were six polling places that had more than 100 percent of the estimated registered voters reportedly turn out. At one location, the turn out was nearly a third high than the number of voters registered.
“It is state organized fraud,” said Karzai’s main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, a former minister in Karzai’s government, on Saturday.
True, it is state sponsored fraud. But no one here in America will care. We were all in a tizzy over fraudulent elections in Iran, remember? But then, we aren’t occupying Iran to prop up its corrupt government, so no harm, no foul, right? And the only people dying are Taliban insurgents, US and NATO allies and innocent people we just happen to bomb. No helpful riots in the streets. No pictures of young women being shot and killed by evil government thugs. No frantic tweets from anonymous Afghani protesters.
No, we are far more concerned about our Evil Black Tyrant President daring to speak to school kids about working hard at their studies. Now that’s important news, dadgummint!
The most corrupt country on earth was never going to have a clean election. I think they’d be better off sticking with the loya jirga system. The elders tell people how to vote anyway in most of the country.
We will be in Afghanistan for years and when we leave nothing will have changed.
Well, we have had our own sanctioned (Diebold) election fraud. Nothing to get excited about. Move along, move along.
Please note that with the Democrats in power no one seems all that interested in protecting the ballot box here. When there should be a scrupulous smashing of all voting systems that cannot be verified we get a true bipartisan… nothing. Thanks for playing the game.
By the way, there was a very good essay from Robert Parry over at ConsortiumNews.com a month or so back on the backgrounds of people in the Iranian election:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/062409.html
The people who lost the election and claimed it was stolen (Mousavi et al) were the people who back in 1980 were the Iranian side of the October Surprise. That is, these were the guys who negotiated with the Republicans/CIA to hold the hostages until after the election in order to get that stream of under-the-table weapons for their war against Iraq when Reagan was sworn in.
Parry was the writer who was marginalized by the mainstream village for writing THE OCTOBER SURPRISE. Stealing elections. It happens all the time, folks.
And now you understand where those wild claims from Ahmadinejad that the CIA was behind those demonstrations come from.
What a mess.
.
All in the name of spreading democracy … the extraordinary way. Many NATO soldiers lost their lives so polling stations in remote areas could open.
KABUL, Afghanistan (NY Times) — Afghans loyal to President Hamid Karzai set up hundreds of fictitious polling sites where no one voted but where hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president’s re-election, according to senior Western and Afghan officials here.
“We think that about 15 percent of the polling sites never opened on Election Day,” the senior Western diplomat said. “But they still managed to report thousands of ballots for Karzai.”
Results suggest fraud alarms have been sidestepped (Times Online)Besides creating the fake sites, Mr. Karzai’s supporters also took over approximately 800 legitimate polling centers and used them to fraudulently report tens of thousands of additional ballots for Mr. Karzai, the officials said.
The result, the officials said, is that in some provinces, the pro-Karzai ballots may exceed the people who actually voted by a factor of 10.
Afghan preliminary election results
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."