Aliyev’s opponents say it was impossible for them to compete, which sounds about right. “The choice of candidates was skimpy,” Sabrina Tavernise wrote last week in the New York Times. “There were six, aside from Mr. Aliyev, but they were political nobodies, and few voters interviewed in Baku on Wednesday could identify any of them.” Imagine how free and fair our own presidential election would be if only Senator Barack Obama or Senator John McCain had name recognition.

Pretty hilarious lefthanded commentary (http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/totten/39341) about the latest rigged election in Azerbaijan.

We screamed and yelled about having international election monitors here to ensure the 2004 election, but it does make me wonder if we could ever have a sufficient large rejection of the political process to matter. What would happen if instead of approximately the 110 million (out of 220 approximate possibles) we currently get, less than 40 million people cast a ballot?