Kazakh leader apologizes for 98% victory at the polls

By Newsmachete

Kazakhstan's leader feels a little embarrassed winning re-election by such a wide margin:

Kazakhstan’s long-serving President Nursultan Nazarbayev apologised on Monday for winning re-election with 97.7 per cent of the vote, saying it would have “looked undemocratic” for him to intervene to make his victory more modest.

Sunday’s election gives another five year term to the 74-year-old former steelworker, who has ruled the oil-producing nation since rising to the post of its Soviet-era Communist Party boss in 1989. Central Election Commission data showed turnout was 95.22 per cent.

Television showed a triumphant Nazarbayev walking on a red carpet, smiling and shaking hands and greeting thousands of jubilant supporters at what officials called “The Victors’ Forum” held in a spacious stadium in the capital Astana.

“Kazakhstan has shown its political culture to the entire world,” he told his supporters.

There's nothing for him to apologize for, is there? After all, he appealed to such a wide proportion of the population! If anything, he should be embarrassed about the last two percent. What was the problem? Did he not campaign enough? Did he campaign too much? What went wrong?

Nazarbayev is lionised by state media and is officially titled “Leader of the Nation”. He is permitted by law to run as often as he wishes. Most of his vocal opponents have either been jailed or fled abroad. At a later news conference, he said of the poll results: “I apologise that for super-democratic states such figures are unacceptable. But I could do nothing. If I had interfered, I would have looked undemocratic, right?”

Follow this logic if you can! If he had intervened in an "election" that gave him 98% of the vote, he says he would have been undemocratic. How would he have intervened? Is Nazarbayev trying to say that he would have taken undemocratic steps to reduce his popularity, to get a lower share of the vote?

I think there is a real lesson here for Nazarbayev, but he is still not quite getting it. He is right to be uncomfortable getting 98% of the vote. His model should be Obama, who won a very credible-looking 51% of the vote in 2012.

President Obama didn't fix the election outright, producing ridiculous voting percentages. Instead, he influenced the election with more subtle methods.

First, he imported an enormous population of noncitizens, crushed any attempts to deport them, and hooked them on government benefits.

Second, he squashed any attempts to maintain the integrity of the voter roles. His attorney general sued states who tried to require the most elementary forms of identification for voting, and he refused to cooperate with states who wanted to compare voter lists with the federal government, to see if they were really citizens.

In that way he created a potential pool of millions of new voters who were indebted to him. All of them didn't have to vote, but enough of them voting could easily provided the margin of victory for him in a number of states.

And then, when the election results are announced, look, Obama got only 51%. Now that's how to run a credible-looking election.

This article was produced by NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.