BEFORE Christmas I suggested that one thing that makes a country democratic - not the only one - is whether there can be a peaceful transfer of power from one set of rulers to another following an election.
I said there was no chance this would happen in Russia and I was right.
It was old Joe Stalin who was supposed to have said that it doesn't matter how people vote - what matters is who counts the votes.
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But the election in Russia was not rigged by anything so crude as stuffing the ballot boxes or falsifying the count.
They did it by controlling the media, banning parties and candidates, and preventing them campaigning.
We have since seen another rigged election in Kenya, until then thought to be a pioneer of democratic change in Africa.
Their election was indeed open and vigorously contested, and the voting itself seems to have been for the most part free and fair.
But the widespread protests and violence followed the declaration of President Kibaki as the winner after what seems to have been a rather outrageous application of the Joe Stalin doctrine.
The delayed election in Pakistan got off to an inauspicious start following the dreadful assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and many people feared the worst.
Everyone knew that President Musharraf and his party - the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) - was very unpopular, and was facing a real challenge from the two main opposition parties, Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League (N), and various smaller parties.
No-one doubts that the authorities engaged in a fair amount of intimidation and some vote-rigging on behalf of Musharraf's candidates.
The amazing thing is that in spite of this he was so unpopular that the two main opposition parties between them won about 60 per cent of the seats, and Musharraf's party less than one in six of them.
Whether Pakistan can now transfer power in a democratic way depends on a lot of things - the parties and their leaders, the army, the religious militants (one unexpected result was the trouncing of the extreme Islamist MMA party in their North West Frontier stronghold).
So far the omens may be hopeful and that matters for a lot of our fellow citizens here in East Lancashire.
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