How does a wannabe autocrat wants to claim an overwhelming victory in a “free” election?  After jailing his main opponent, he goes about rigging the polls in such an overt way, making his claimed 80% of the vote absurd.

The Associated Press details the steps Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko and his Party took to secure the election for him, from vote rigging to firing poll watchers to having election officials sign blank results forms–before the election was held.

Lukashenko claimed he received 80% of the 5.7 million votes cast, with his chief opponent, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, receiving just 780,000 votes.  A former English teacher, Tsikhanouskaya took over the opposition when Lukashenko jailed her husband, who had led the effort to oust the president.

AP reports that poll workers were pressured to provide false results on official forms.  One election officials was forced to sign a falsified tally of votes.  Another was told to sign a blank results form, with the totals of the votes for each candidate blank, before the voting had finished and no ballots were counted.

Poll workers were fired on the spot when they raised concerns about irregularities or violations.  In a clip posted to YouTube, Lukashenko allies were recorded telling poll workers to swap the totals for Lukashenko and Tsikhanouskaya.

“Given the manner in which the vote has been rigged, I can vouch that no one — not us, not the Central Election Commission — knows the real result of the election,” Alexander Khomich, a spokesman for the activist group Honest People that monitored the election, told the AP.