The Engaging Story of History’s Most Fraudulent Election

According to most people ‘politics’ And ‘corruption’ are synonyms, and much evidence can be offered for the connection between the two words. From collusion to stealing votes, some figures prefer to play with the election results rather than being the voice of the people.

To put it more simply, political elections full of tension and intrigue We can compare it to a string. Our country is getting ready for a big election. If you think that this election is one of the most tense elections in Turkey’s history, we suggest that you put it aside until you read what happened in the 1927 presidential election in Liberia.

Let’s take a brief look at Liberia’s history before we move on to what was officially recorded as the world’s most fraudulent election.

Liberia, It is Africa’s first and oldest modern republic. The country was founded by emancipated blacks from the United States in the early to mid-1800s. Located between Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and Guinea, Liberia is not a large country.

Geographically, approx. With an area of ​​111,369 square kilometers owner. However, like every African country, Liberia has been facing harsh climatic conditions, food shortages, weak infrastructure and many diseases that have caused the death of millions of people in the region since its inception.

Besides all these problems, Liberia has a feature that distinguishes it from other African countries.

The country is larger than most of the rest of the continent. It gained its independence 100 years ago. and has been choosing its own leader ever since. He chooses, but just like in the elections in 1927, how fair these elections are, that’s where it is debated.

Let’s come to our main topic, the 1927 Liberian general election.

Two candidates were running in the 1927 Liberian election. The first candidate is the head of the current government True Whig Party and is the main protagonist of our story. It was Charles DB King. Opposite him, the leader of the People’s Party Thomas J. Faulkner was located.

King, who previously served as the nation’s attorney general and secretary of state, was first elected president in 1919. King, who had won the two previous elections, He also wanted to win the third election.

You would think that someone who won the election twice before, would easily enter the third election, wouldn’t you?

But something the opposition candidate Faulkner did with his election campaign worried the King should be. Perhaps Faulkner told the public how much damage King’s actions had done to the country. Perhaps the public has begun to say openly that they will no longer vote for King.

We don’t know what happened until election day, but all the Liberian people knew that the elections would be heated. However, no one entered the Guinness Book of Records of the 1927 Liberian elections. from ‘fraud’ He didn’t expect to come in.

Meanwhile, it is worth noting that the number of voters in Liberia is unusually small.

In 1927, women had not yet been granted the right to vote, so only adult men had the right to vote in that year’s elections. When election day comes, just 15,000 Liberians had registered to vote.

According to the official results after the vote counting process, Charles DB King was fully 240 thousand votes was elected president, while his rival, Thomas J. Faulkner, 9 thousand votes was left. King, full of current electorate. 16 times more votes He had knocked out his opponent.

The opposition knew that 15,000 people would vote in the election. It didn’t take long to realize that the election was rigged, as the number of Liberian voters wouldn’t change overnight. But since they have no evidence and all power is in the current government didn’t make much noise and the third term of Charles DB King began.

However, Faulkner continued his opposition, although he could not do much about the election.

Shortly after the election, some of the high-ranking members of King’s True Whig Party were housed in their own homes. run a slave and accused him of selling slaves to a Spanish colony. At first, King’s administration refused to investigate Faulkner’s allegations and tried to sweep the entire scandal under the rug.

However, the League of Nations opposed this and formed a committee to investigate the allegations. It turned out that President King and many of his aides were forced into slave labor in their own homes, even though they could not find any concrete evidence of the sale of slaves. In 1930, an impeachment suit was filed against King, but before the case was concluded. King resigned.