But it makes me wonder what visible features obviously-rigged elections actually present in dictatorships?
In the old days, you could have really blatant things like an official number of pro-dictator votes significantly higher than the number of citizens in the whole country (I’m not kidding, I can’t find the reference right now but I’m pretty sure that it happened in some African dictatorship around 1920).
Ok I found it. It was the 1927 Liberian election, where the president received 240,000 votes despite being around 15,000 people eligible to vote at all.
Are you really doubting that 225 000 people flew to Liberia just to vote for him?
Jokes aside, yes, it was historically way easier back then to sabotage or trick elections. Liberia is a special case, where the human rights abuses there which included suspicions of practicing slavery very nearly resulted in it being placed as a Polish protectorate (yes, Poland). Flow of information being slow and mostly conveyed through newspapers or newsreel at the theater really gave anyone in charge who had decent executive power a better hand in manipulating outcomes of elections. Right now, we have increased scrutiny making it way harder to successfully pull it out, which is why states that do it tend not to even bother trying to hide it (Belarus, Russia’s referendums in Ukraine, Algeria, etc.)
In the old days, you could have really blatant things like an official number of pro-dictator votes significantly higher than the number of citizens in the whole country (I’m not kidding, I can’t find the reference right now but I’m pretty sure that it happened in some African dictatorship around 1920).
For a more recent example, you could look at the 2020 Belarus election, for which we have photos of literally burnt ballots (I’m just reporting the link from the Wikipedia page).
Ok I found it. It was the 1927 Liberian election, where the president received 240,000 votes despite being around 15,000 people eligible to vote at all.
Are you really doubting that 225 000 people flew to Liberia just to vote for him?
Jokes aside, yes, it was historically way easier back then to sabotage or trick elections. Liberia is a special case, where the human rights abuses there which included suspicions of practicing slavery very nearly resulted in it being placed as a Polish protectorate (yes, Poland). Flow of information being slow and mostly conveyed through newspapers or newsreel at the theater really gave anyone in charge who had decent executive power a better hand in manipulating outcomes of elections. Right now, we have increased scrutiny making it way harder to successfully pull it out, which is why states that do it tend not to even bother trying to hide it (Belarus, Russia’s referendums in Ukraine, Algeria, etc.)