{"id":2157,"date":"2007-03-28T22:29:02","date_gmt":"2007-03-29T05:29:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2007\/03\/28\/random-iraqi-election-thought\/"},"modified":"2007-03-28T22:29:02","modified_gmt":"2007-03-29T05:29:02","slug":"random-iraqi-election-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2007\/03\/28\/random-iraqi-election-thought\/","title":{"rendered":"random Iraqi Election thought"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A random thought that crept into my mind about about Saddam Hussein and Iraq.  Through his tenure as Dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein held regular elections, the typical dictator &#8220;Yes \/ No&#8221; ballot.  They regularly showed him winning by margins of &#8212; oh &#8212; 11,256,482 to 26 &#8212; the fate of those 26 you have to wonder what their fates were.\u00c2\u00a0  The final election was held on October 16, 2002, which saw Saddam Hussein win by&#8230; get this &#8212;<a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/middle_east\/2331951.stm\"> <\/a><font size=\"2\" face=\"sans-serif\" class=\"body\"><a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/middle_east\/2331951.stm\">11,445,638 to 0<\/a> &#8212; every eligible voter voted, and they all voted for Hussein.<\/font><\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, Saddam had not as of yet discovered the joys of purple ink, which would have made the spectacle complete.<\/p>\n<p>Now, call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think there was some election fraud in that one.\u00c2\u00a0 I think a handful or two did indeed vote against Saddam, but those votes either weren&#8217;t counted, or were converted into &#8220;yes&#8221; votes by&#8230; oh, I don&#8217;t know, Diebold machines.<\/p>\n<p>Someone should look into that one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A random thought that crept into my mind about about Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Through his tenure as Dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein held regular elections, the typical dictator &#8220;Yes \/ No&#8221; ballot. They regularly showed him winning by margins of &#8212; oh &#8212; 11,256,482 to 26 &#8212; the fate of those 26 you have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}