Asham election, orshow election, is anelection that is held purely for show; that is, without any significant political choice or real impact on the results of the election.[1]
Sham elections are a common event indictatorial regimes that feel the need to feign the appearance of publiclegitimacy. Published results usually show highvoter turnout and high support (typically at least 80%, and close to 100% in many cases) for the prescribed candidates or for thereferendum choice that favours thepolitical party in power. Dictatorial regimes can also organize sham elections with results simulating those that might be achieved in democratic countries.[2]
Sometimes, only one government-approved candidate is allowed to run in sham elections with no opposition candidates allowed, or opposition candidates are arrested on false charges (or even without any charges) before the election to prevent them from running.[3][4][5] Ballots may contain only one "yes" option, or in the case of a simple "yes or no" question, security forces oftenpersecute people who pick "no", thus encouraging them to pick the "yes" option. In other cases, those who vote receive stamps in their passport for doing so, while those who did not vote (and thus do not receive stamps) are persecuted asenemies of the people.[6][7]
Sham elections can sometimes backfire against the party in power, especially if the regime believes they are popular enough to win without coercion, fraud or suppressing the opposition. The most famous example of this was the1990 Myanmar general election, in which the government-sponsoredNational Unity Party suffered a landslide defeat by the oppositionNational League for Democracy and consequently, the results were annulled.[8]
Examples of sham elections include:
InMexico, all of the presidential elections from1929 to1982 are considered to be sham elections, as theInstitutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its predecessors governed the country in ade facto single-party system without serious opposition, and they won all of the presidential elections in that period with more than 70% of the vote. The first seriously competitive presidential election in modern Mexican history was that of1988, in which for the first time the PRI candidate faced two strong opposition candidates, though it is believed that the government rigged the result. The first fair election was held in1994, though the opposition did not win until2000.
A predetermined conclusion is permanently established by the regime throughsuppression of the opposition,coercion of voters,vote rigging, reporting several votes received greater than the number of voters, outright lying, or some combination of these. In an extreme example,Charles D. B. King ofLiberia was reported to have won by 234,000 votes in the1927 general election, a "majority" that was over fifteen times larger than the number of eligible voters.[14]