???Daily Mail on UK General Election:
Hung parliament or not, the General Election produced one clear result on the night. All the TV pundits agreed that this was one of the most shambolic, incompetent and fraudulent elections Britain has ever witnessed.
From widespread allegations of postal-vote fraud, to the hugely unreliable electoral register, to the scenes of mutiny outside polling stations that were closed before hundreds had been able to vote, this was a disgrace to the democratic process.
These are abuses of process one might expect in a banana republic, not in the land that gave us the Mother of all Parliaments.
Having acted as an official observer in more than a hundred polls across the old Communist bloc, I have witnessed more incompetence and corruption than I care to remember. Yet this week’s British election has shocked even seasoned monitors like me. As one friend from Azerbaijan remarked archly to me yesterday, ‘At least in my country, we have managed chaos.’
What he meant was that while many corrupt governments around the world actively fiddle elections, in Britain we have witnessed fiasco rather than state-sponsored fraud.
