It’s not as if anyone expected Azerbaijan’s elections to be anything less than predetermined.  It’s your basic central Asian dictatorship that jails its critics.  So when Dictator Ilham Aliyev won this week’s elections with 72.75 percent of the vote, the only surprising thing was the timing of the announcement:  A full day before voting had even begun.

The 51-year-old Aliyev has been president of the authoritarian, oil-rich Caspian Sea nation since taking over from his ailing father Heydar in October 2003.  He’s stepped up intimidation of activists and journalists since then, and his government has been compared to a mafia family.

But for some reason, Azerbaijan still wants to give the appearance of being a democracy.  So it was a little awkward when Azerbaijan’s election authorities announced the results of the poll a day in advance.

They tried to roll it back, claiming the data were old numbers from the 2008 election sent out as a system test.  Except that the names were of the candidates running in this year’s election.

After the polls closed, the authorities released the new results:  Aliyez won by an ever bigger margin, just under 85 percent of the vote.