Rigging elections is a tricky business. Part of the secret is to dazzle with numbers: 75,000 election officials organised voting at nearly 8,000 Algerian polling stations this week. More than 15,000 town councils and 48 provincial authorities were elected. If we are to believe the official figures announced here yesterday, 66.16 per cent of 15.8 million voters cast their ballot. In Algiers, where election officials sometimes outnumber voters in polling stations, the government admitted to the lowest turnout of 45.6 per cent.
Perhaps the trickiest part is to know just how much to cheat. Results of the Saddam Husseinstyle 99.9 per cent variety can make you a laughing stock. But when the fruits of Thursday's "exercise in democracy" were announced in Algiers yesterday, it was clear they had overdone it.
The only words that rang true were those of a spokesman for the secular, predominantly Berber opposition Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD): "It is not possible and not logical that Zeroual's party achieved these results," he said, referring to President Liamine Zeroual's party, the National Democratic Rally (RND).
Indeed. The RND and its ally and predecessor as the official Algerian government party, the National Liberation Front (FLN), won more than 70 per cent of the councils at stake at a time when the country is wracked by violence, and it is difficult to find an Algerian who expresses anything but contempt for the government.
Yet the RND took 7,242 of 13,123 townships, and the FLN took 2,864. By comparison, the third runner-up, the moderate Islamic party Hamas, which actually has a popular following encompassing many forms of voters for the banned Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), obtained a mere 890 towns.
The FLN, a fig-leaf for the military, ruled Algeria as a one-party state from 1962 until 1989. It was so discredited by corruption that President Zeroual took most of the members of the FLM and resurrected the party as the RND last spring, in time to win a majority in the parliamentary elections in June.
Mr Mustefa Benmansour, the Interior Minister and civilian front man for the military, announced the results at a press conference.
Wearing professorial half-moon glasses, the former governor of Constantine rattled off the results at machinegun speed, then departed before journalists could ask awkward questions about fraud allegations. The election had taken place "in conditions of perfect regularity," he said. Algerians voted "in sovereignty and total freedom", he added.
He described the series of four polls organised over the past two years as a "process of political legitimisation", and October 23rd as "a historic day when Algerians thwarted hatred and terror".
Few outside the Algerian government are likely to be impressed by this chronicle of an election foretold. RND supporters were so certain they would win that they began driving through the capital honking car horns in celebration before the results were even announced. After each of the last three elections, violence resumed more savagely than before.