Sham election

A sham election, or show election, is an election that is held purely for show; that is, without any significant political choice or real impact on the results of the election.

Description

Sham elections are a common event in dictatorial regimes that feel the need to feign the appearance of public legitimacy. Published results usually show high voter turnout and high support for the prescribed candidates or for the referendum choice that favours the political party in power. Dictatorial regimes can also organize sham elections with results simulating those that might be achieved in democratic countries.
Sometimes, only one government-approved candidate is allowed to run in sham elections with no opposition candidates allowed, or opposition candidates are arrested on false charges before the election to prevent them from running. Ballots may contain only one "yes" option, or in the case of a simple "yes or no" question, security forces often persecute people who pick "no", thus encouraging them to pick the "yes" option. In other cases, those who vote receive stamps in their passport for doing so, while those who did not vote are persecuted as enemies of the people.
Sham elections can sometimes backfire against the party in power, especially if the regime believes they are popular enough to win without coercion, fraud or suppressing the opposition. The most famous example of this was the 1990 Myanmar general election, in which the government-sponsored National Unity Party suffered a landslide defeat by the opposition National League for Democracy and consequently, the results were annulled.

History

Examples of sham elections include:

The 1929 and 1934 elections in Fascist Italy
The 1942 general election in Imperial Japan
Those in Nazi Germany, East Germany other than the election in 1990
The 1940 elections of Stalinist "People's Parliaments" to legitimise the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
Those in Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
Those in Bangladesh under Sheikh Hasina
Those in Eswatini under Mswati III
Those in Russia under Vladimir Putin
Those in Syria under Hafez Al-Assad and his son Bashar Al-Assad
Those in Venezuela since the 2017 Self-coup
Those in Rwanda since 1965
Those in Azerbaijan under Heydar Aliyev and his son Ilham Aliyev
The 1928, 1935, 1942, 1949, 1951 and 1958 elections in Portugal
Those in Indonesia during New Order regime
Those in Belarus after 1994
The 1991 and 2019 Kazakh presidential elections
Those in North Korea
The 1995 and 2002 presidential referendums in Saddam Hussein's Iraq
Those in Cuba since the 1952 Cuban coup d'état.
Those in Hong Kong since the electoral system changes in 2021
Those in Pahlavi Iran since the aftermath of the 1953 Iranian coup d'etat, notably in 1975
The 2009 and 2021 presidential elections in the Islamic Republic of Iran
The 1984 Nicaraguan general election aswell as the 2011, 2016, and the 2021 elections in Nicaragua.
The 2025 Tanzanian general election was decried by many as a sham election.

In Mexico, all of the presidential elections from 1929 to 1982 are considered to be sham elections, as the Institutional Revolutionary Party and its predecessors governed the country in a de facto single-party system without serious opposition, and they won all of the presidential elections in that period with more than 70% of the vote. The first seriously competitive presidential election in modern Mexican history was that of 1988, in which for the first time the PRI candidate faced two strong opposition candidates, though it is believed that the government rigged the result. The first fair election was held in 1994, though the opposition did not win until 2000.
A predetermined conclusion is permanently established by the regime through suppression of the opposition, coercion of voters, vote rigging, reporting several votes received greater than the number of voters, outright lying, or some combination of these. In an extreme example, Charles D. B. King of Liberia was reported to have won by 234,000 votes in the 1927 general election, a "majority" that was over fifteen times larger than the number of eligible voters.