Why Putin's sham election shows what he's afraid of

Autocrats have a talent for producing impressive election results. In the last elections they ever ran in, Indonesian dictator Suharto achieved 75 per cent of the vote; Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had 89 per cent; Romanian Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu mastered an impressive 98 per cent. My friend Boris Vishnevsky, a leading opposition legislator in St. Petersburg, likes to point out that Ceausescu still had a 99 per cent approval rating in December 1989, just one week before his trial (and subsequent execution). As all these victors found out in the end, the results of manipulated "elections" in authoritarian systems are a poor indicator of the actual state of public opinion.