44 candidates with zero votes

Over at my main site, GP Daily, we cover the gamut of corruption news. This inevitably includes elections around the world, which are increasingly linked to questionable practices.

Occasionally, in this mess of daily scandal, a story stands out simply because it is so preposterous. The one playing with my mind at the moment is from the Dominican Republic, where last months elections produced 44 candidates who did not receive one vote between them.

Now you don’t need to be a mathematician to work out the odds of such a result well into the realms of impossibility.

Delving into the story a bit further produced some other interesting factoids for the electorally attuned, but first up some demographics.

The Dom Rep is slightly more than twice the size of New Hampshire.

It shares its Island space with Haiti.

Population is about 9,183,984 spread through cities to rugged highlands and mountains with fertile valleys.

Okay, the rugged mountains must be a bit of a hurdle, but it has taken nearly one full month to count and record the vote from the May 16 election.

A full three days after Dominican voters cast their ballots last Tuesday, the Organization of American States (O.A.S.) International Observers Mission is concerned over the slow rate at which the elections’ results are being released, a delay many blame for the violence in the post electoral process.

Observers from the O.A.S. Mission then affirmed that the Dominican electoral system has effective control and security mechanisms to guarantee the will of the voters.

Despite the duration and the no vote anomalies, the president of the Electoral Central Board affirmed today that the recently concluded Dominican electoral process "was normal within the circumstances."

A critical cardinal Nicolas de Jesus Lopez Rodriguez, accused them of “not knowing how to count.”

Within a week of the vote 10 people had been killed in election related incidents.

Unfortunately I’m a little language challenged, so I couldn’t pick up much of the background or the actual published disputed returns. I guess we’ll just have to wait until they hit the English editions.