As River reports, “technically, we don’t know the candidates. We know the principal heads of the lists but we don’t know who exactly will be running. It really is confusing. They aren’t making the lists public because they are afraid the candidates will be assassinated”
An election in which the voters don’t know who the candidates are? That sounds weird enough. But then there are the voter registration cards:
[O]n all the voting cards, the gender of the voter, regardless of sex, is labeled “male”. […] Why is the sex on the card anyway? […] Some are saying that many of the more religiously inclined families won’t want their womenfolk voting so it might be permissible for the head of the family to take the women’s ID and her ballot and do the voting for her. Another theory is that this ‘mistake’ will make things easier for people making fake IDs to vote in place of females.
Apparently there’s a brisk trade in voting cards: the going rate is around $400. But at least River’s family has received voting cards. In many places, election officials are refusing to carry out voter registration because of death threats.