Not that Georgia

Rico says he thought at first it was about our election (the headline threw him off: Fearing Rigged Vote, Georgians Prepare for Elections), but Ellen Barry has an article in The New York Times about their election:

The leader of Georgia’s Orthodox Church used a Sunday service to warn against vote-rigging in Monday’s parliamentary voting, as the country braced for one of the most unpredictable elections in its twenty-year post-Soviet history.
The two-month campaign between President Mikheil Saakashvili and his billionaire challenger, Bidzina Ivanishvili, has left the country divided, with opposition voters deeply suspicious that the results will be falsified.
Patriarch Ilia II, who is among the country’s most respected figures, has been careful not to align himself with either political force, refraining from strong comments after the release of video clips showing abuse in the country’s prisons. On Sunday, however, he seemed to directly address Saakashvili’s government, urging it to heed signals from the public. “The ancient Romans used to say, Vox populi, vox dei,” the patriarch said in his weekly sermon. “These elections are very important, and we expect there will be no violations and the elections will not be falsified. Those who the people want elected should be elected. If there are violations, what will we then have to say to our ancestors? They will not forgive us,” he said.
An already tense situation escalated late on Sunday night, when an activist for Ivanishvili’s party, Georgian Dream, in a region east of the capital reported that her nine-month-old niece had been abducted and found drowned. A spokeswoman for the party, Maia Panjikidze, claimed at a hastily arranged news conference that the child’s aunt had received numerous threats from representatives of the ruling party who wanted her to stop promoting Georgian Dream.
The Georgian Interior Ministry said it would investigate, and called it “unfortunate that the Georgian Dream coalition has politicized this tragic event”.
A crowd estimated at more than a hundred thousand thronged the center of Tbilisi on Saturday to hear a campaign speech from Ivanishvili. He has promised to bolster agricultural production and address the country’s unemployment rate, which is said to be far higher than the official figure of sixteen percent. “I smell victory, and I smell a free country,” Ivanishvili told a crowd extending for blocks down Rustaveli Avenue. He made a pointed appeal to the police and other government officials, apparently in anticipation of a standoff after the election results are announced. “Do not raise your hands against the citizens of your own country,” he said. People interviewed in the crowd said they were certain that Ivanishvili’s party would win the election, and equally certain that the government would declare victory. Alexander Cherkezishvili, 49, said he was bracing for what would happen. “Nothing will happen on Monday, we will have elections, that’s all,” he said. “The main question is what will happen on Tuesday. If there is fraud, people will fill the streets. I personally will go out.”
The government’s pollsters are equally confident, saying that Saakashvili’s party, the United National Movement, began with a hefty lead and has rebounded from the damage inflicted by the release of the prison abuse videos last month. Giga Bokeria, Saakashvili’s national security adviser, told reporters in Tbilisi that his fears about election-related violence had subsided since then, though he said opposition leaders were stoking tensions.
“Any party raises expectations of victory, it’s normal,” Bokeria said. But, he said, pointing to a certain number “and saying that anything different from this number, like sixty percent, would automatically mean a stolen election, is also a problematic message to core supporters, and could bring up the temperature and contribute to incidents.”
Giorgi Gogia, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said his expectations had changed markedly since two weeks ago, when he expected the United National Movement to win 55 or 60 percent of the vote. At Saturday’s demonstration, he said, the opposition crowds were “very, very confident,” and left the impression that they would take to the streets if they were unhappy with the results. “It’s the first time in twenty years of Georgia’s history that we actually don’t know the outcome of the elections,” he said. “This is the first time when the opposition also has the resources to galvanize people.”

Rico says that Ivanishvili obviously never saw Apocalypse Now, otherwise he'd know that "I smell victory" would require the smell of napalm in the morning...