Vote for me or else! We look back to history’s dodgiest elections

WE may not agree with whoever wins on May 8, but at least we can be sure the occupant of No 10 got there by fair means rather than foul.

This isn’t always the case elsewhere and history is littered with examples of dodgy dealing and outright criminality when it comes to casting your vote.

Are you going to argue with the machete-wielding men outside the polling station “suggesting” which candidate you should place an “X” next to?

Might a plain brown envelope stuffed with cash tempt you to reconsider your lifelong leftist leanings?

How about if you draw the curtain behind you, unfold your ballot paper and see a single name staring back at you?

Actually, that last one sounds not half bad in light of the plethora of candidates I’ve had to plough my way through in recent years.

The Bring Back Radio Luxembourg Pirate Party? Do me a favour.

To be honest, some of the electoral fraud is so breathtaking in its bare-faced cheek, you have to doff your hat.

Take a bow, Liberian President Charles D.B. King, who won the 1927 election by 234,000 votes despite the West African country having just 15,000 registered voters.

Rivalling King for sheer chutzpah was Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who installed himself as President of Haiti in 1957.

His seven predecessors had declared themselves President For Life but Western trading partners no, not those backed by the CIA, honestly, ahem persuaded him to have public elections instead.

So in 1962, after the ballots were counted, it was found 1,320,748 Haitians had backed Papa Doc and, er, none had voted for anyone else.

It probably helped that all the ballot papers were pre-marked with his name and no one was allowed to run against him.

He then promptly named himself President For Life.

People are actually allowed to run against President Putin of Russia but all government employees are STRONGLY URGED to vote for him if they want to keep their jobs and, as they make up 20% of the electorate, that pretty much wraps it up for Mad Vlad.

In the Mexican general election of 1988, Carlos Salinas de Gortari was declared the winner, despite his opponent having a large lead in the polls.

The government claimed the vote-counting computer system had crashed but basically they were busy making up the results.

The ballot papers were then burned to prevent anyone checking.

The same thing was done after the notorious 1946 Romanian elections, one of the most-rigged of all time, in which the Communist Party basically absorbed most of the other parties before the vote, whether they liked it or not.

Voters were trucked from polling station to polling station to vote for candidates several times while the army put areas where opposing parties were popular under lockdown.

There have been more subtle tricks.

In the 1955 referendum on reuniting Vietnam, the ballots for the US-backed Ngo Dinh Diem (left) were red, a colour associated with good luck and prosperity, while opponent Bao Dai’s were green which signifies the exact opposite.

In Africa, Zimbabwe’s become a byword for electoral fraud and voter harassment with the corrupt 91-year-old dictator he can sue if he likes Robert Mugabe clinging to power for 31 years by using every trick in the book.

So it comes as a surprise that the Nigerian polls of 2007 were described as even more corrupt.

Entire voter registration lists were made up and included such unlikely voters as Nelson Mandela, Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali, none of whom are a native of Lagos as far as I can recall.

But while we can laugh at these plundered polls, the cold, hard truth is that the electorate has been denied the result they would have voted for.

And it’s not just in the more far-flung places it happens.

Take the US Presidential election of 2000.

Now, I may be risking a CIA drone strike or a letter from some nice gentlemen in the legal profession but there’s substantial evidence that George W Bush stole that election from Al Gore, who should have been named the 43rd POTUS.

The result hinged on Florida, where the narrow margin of victory triggered a recount.

In some areas, potential Gore voters couldn’t cast their ballot because their names were the same as or similar to convicted felons.

Individual counties in the Sunshine State started legal proceedings over their results and the litigation eventually reached the US Supreme Court who, to the fury of many, ended the recounts, which basically handed the state and overall victory to “Dubya”.

And who exactly was the Governor of Florida while all this was going on? Why, George’s little brother Jeb.