The Biggest Rigged Elections of All Time

Mexico, 1988

This is probably the most subtle fraud on the list. Typically when political scumbags cook the books, they do it in a big way to give the impression of a mandate, but the 1988 Mexican elections that saw Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the Institutional Revolutionary Party take office was almost too close to call. Gortari pulled only 50.7% of the vote, the lowest of any winning candidate since elections began in 1917. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the candidate for the rival National Democratic Front, was far ahead in the polls, so the IRP went hog wild to make up the difference, publicly declaring that the vote-tabulating computer system had crashed, forging the results and declaring themselves the winner. All of the paper ballots were burned afterwards so nobody could prove the fraud.

Romania, 1946

The early days of proto-Communist nations were often rife with scandal, and one of the most suspect elections of all time happened in Romania in 1946. The scales were tipped from the start when the Romanian Communist Party essentially absorbed a number of smaller parties into a larger voting bloc, but the powers behind the Party weren't satisfied with doing things legally. From the outside, things looked pretty kosher - it was the first election in Romania that gave women the vote, for example. But on election day, things got crazy. Voters were trucked from precinct to precinct to vote for RCP candidates multiple times, and Army soldiers cracked down on areas where opposing parties were popular. After the vote, all ballots and count sheets were burned to prevent any investigation.

Liberia, 1927

Liberian President Charles D.B. King seemed like a pretty solid dude. He worked hard to build the tiny country's economy through trade deals and seemed set to bring it into the 20th century. But something seemed weird when he won the 1927 presidential election against Thomas Faulkner by 234,000 votes. That something was probably the fact that Liberia only had 15,000 registered voters. The sheer scale of the fraud in this matter drew more attention to King's policies, which were revealed to include conscripting citizens into forced labor gangs to do public works projects without paying them. He resigned soon after the election.

Georgia, 2003

The dissolution of the Soviet Union created a bevy of new states who were eager to participate in the democratic process. Unfortunately, those states also had a power structure that wanted to stay in power. One of the most notoriously corrupt electoral cycles came in 2003, when the ironically-named "For A New Georgia" party that supported incumbent President Eduard Shevardnadze set out to seriously rig the parliamentary elections in Georgia. Corruption was endemic from top to bottom - the government purged voter rolls in droves, eliminating whole neighborhoods of opposition voters and even denying Mikhail Saakashvili, the opposition leader, the right to vote. After the Rose Revolution later that year, Shevardnadze was forced to resign and new elections were held in 2004.

Germany,  1933

Even Adolf Hitler, history's greatest monster, dabbled in electoral fraud - but only when he had to. The Enabling Act of 1933 was a bill placed to the Reichstag, the governing body of Germany, by the newly-elected Chancellor Hitler. It basically gave executive powers to Hitler to make any damn law he pleased, taking all of the power away from the Reichstag. So why would anyone vote for it? Because Hitler either arrested, killed or drove into hiding all of the members of the opposing Social Democrat party while his crony Goring changed the voting rules to pass it without a quorum. After neutering the Reichstag, Hitler shut it down completely the next year, cementing his status as absolute dictator.

Haiti, 1962

One of the most bizarre cases of rigged elections in all of history came on the tiny island nation of Haiti. Francois Duvalier had installed himself in 1957 as the latest in a long line of tin-pot dictators, but under pressure from Western trading partners, he was urged to have public elections (the last seven guys just declared themselves "Presidents for life"). After a massive heart attack in 1959, Duvalier decided they were right, and nationwide elections were held in 1962 - a year before Duvalier's term was set to end. When the ballots were counted, 1,320,748 Haitians had proudly voted for "Papa Doc" Duvalier. And...none had voted for anybody else. It probably didn't hurt that all of the ballots were pre-marked with his name and nobody was allowed to run against him. After this spectacular victory, Duvalier went ahead and named himself President for life anyways.

Vietnam, 1955

After the 1954 Geneva Conference left Vietnam split between the Communist North and the Capitalist South, the nation desperately wanted to come back together. The solution was the 1955 State of Vietnam Referendum, which pit Emperor Bao Dai against the U.S.-supported Ngo Dinh Diem. The scales were lopsided from the very beginning. Dai wasn't allowed to actively campaign, leaving Diem to spend tons of American money on dirty politics, including mudslinging ads implying that Dai was a drunk womanizer. The ballot system itself was rigged - votes for Diem were with a red ballot, a color associated with prosperity in Asian cultures, while votes for Dai were with green ballots (exactly the opposite). Once the votes were counted, Diem won in a landslide, with more votes cast for him than there were eligible voters.

Russia, 2012

Sure, Vladimir Putin is a pretty serious badass, but that doesn't change the fact that his party has pretty much had a stranglehold in post-communist Russia for decades. The 2012 election that put him back on top is a pretty typical example of how the machine works. Putin needed to secure over 50% of the vote to avoid a runoff election, which could have worked out badly for him. Thankfully, Putin had a secret weapon at his disposal. They're known as the "administrative resource," government employees who are strongly urged to vote the right way if they want to keep their jobs. They make up about 20% of the electorate, and they were enough to get Putin in for another term.