If someone were given the ODIHR report on the April 25th elections, but the word "Albania" would be removed from that report everywhere and they would be asked to say what form of government it has rather, he will most definitely say that we are dealing with a regime in which elections are only for the purpose of reproducing the power of this regime.

If a man were to be told that in this country the government has been in power for eight years, that a former Minister of the Interior of this government, harshly praised by It for four years as the most successful of the whole government , formally charged with drug trafficking; eavesdropping have been published in the international press where people involved in drug trafficking and crime buy votes for the government; if he were to be informed that the public debt has increased by over eight billion euros and about 2.1 billion are concessions for four or five businesses; if he were to be told that the land was planted with cannabis openly, for at least a year; if he were to be told that in these eight years drug trafficking by air appeared for the first time and that cocaine worth millions of euros was coming from Colombia for the first time; if he were to be informed that this government has arrested 32 thousand people for non-payment of electricity or construction of roofs; if he were to be told that the country was left without a Constitutional Court and a Supreme Court for four years, etc., then this man would surely think that the form of government is a perverted autocracy, where everything was upside down and where upside down that everything would be the meaning over the truth because all this power will make misery appear as well-being, suffering as pleasure, failure as achievement, cooperation with crime as fight against it, manipulation of elections as free elections, theft and corruption as big public works etc.

In fact, the ODIHR report has been read by many people from this perspective, even a SP leader claimed that this report was the best one in these 30 years.

What does the report concretely say that proves the fact that the April 25 elections were manipulated by this perverted autocracy?

The report states that a) "… vote-buying practices … remain a problem…"; b) "the leak of personal sensitive data of about 900 thousand Albanian citizens before the elections, including their political preferences, was a serious concern and made the potential voters violated by the pressure"; "Further constitutional changes and the creation of the October 202 elections were not preceded by consultation with stakeholders"; "The implicit provision of services to the interests and the pressure on civil servants was a concern."

Certainly the ODIHR report will not provide details on the arithmetic of the voting boxes, nor on the concrete connection of the government officials with the campaign or with the purchase of votes, nor will it present the effect of power on the election result, or the effect of paying public money (for earthquake) to the voter, it will never show the result of the use of patrons in vote buying and in threatening people, and as well as it will never show how much money was used [to buy a vote and how many votes or mandates were bought.

The report simply states that there were purchases, there was use of power, use of intimidation by patrons or even threats, etc. Meanwhile, we ourselves, the people who are here know and saw that the Social Democratic Party, for example, won three mandates, two in Shkodra and one in Tirana. These mandates seem to have been bought, because this party did not get any tenth of the votes of Tirana in Korça or Durrës, in Fier or Vlora. This is not meanwhile a party with a local vocation, of course, nor a national one. The party has neither public discourse, nor a program, nor people liked by the people.

Why was it voted then?

In addition, this party has unfairly received 35-40 votes in each polling station in Shkodra. In every neighborhood, from Ajasëmi to Zdralja or Gjuhadoli, the same result is observed. The same result seems to also be observed in the area of Nënshkodra or in the Mountains of Kelmendi, Shkreli, villages of Koplik, etc.

Why this deep uniformity of the PSD, while the PD, PS and LSI have large fluctuations from one center to another?

Even in Tirana there are large areas where this party has received interference, box after ballot box 10-15% of the votes, while there are areas where it does not receive votes at all. For example, Zall Bastar or Allias and Shkoza area have a very high PSD presence, while Unit 8, Unit 4, Unit 7, Unit 6, etc., have none.

Everyone knows, for example, that the candidate ranked 30th on the SP list received interference with votes, in a uniform manner, box by box in Kavaja, Rrogozhina, Vora, Allias and other areas in Tirana. An unknown 27-year-old boy defeated almost all SP figures, from Majko to Kodheli. He expelled from Parliament the chairman of the Tirana SP, Ervin Bushati.

Also, everyone saw that all the candidates accused of links to trafficking have had very high scores. In Durrës, MPs Cyrbja, Ndaxhi, Rraja, are among the most voted candidates at the national level. They, too, receive votes in a interfered illegal way, uniformly box after ballot box, while other highly political candidates, including ministers, receive much less votes than they did.

In mathematics there is a law known as Benford law or the law of abnormal numbers. It bears the name of the mathematician Frank Benford and describes or shows the frequency of the first digit of numerical data of different communities or events from everyday life. According to this law, the probability that the first digit of a number or a series of numbers that reflects a set of events or a phenomenon is 1 is 30%, the probability that this first digit is 2 is 17%, the probability that this digit life 3 is 13% and so on until the 5% chance it will be 9. This law is used a lot, especially in the US, to find tax evasion or anomalies in paying taxes, in money laundering in banks. If the frequency of the first digits is not according to Benford law, then something bad has happened.

If we look at the result of the SP according to each constituency or according to each voting station, we will notice madness. Not only the Benford's law is not there, but also the first figures appear quite the opposite. There are more numbers 2 and 3 than 1. When the CEC reveals the data for each polling station, then this will seem clearer. The Socialist Party in Tirana, Elbasan, Durrës, has abolished every concept of Benford law and has strongly intervened in the result with non-political factors. Even in Shkodra, Lezha, Dibra, there have been strong interventions by the SP. Here, too, Benford's law has been destroyed by vote-buying.

On the other hand, we will see that in Durrës the SP has increased by about 3 thousand votes compared to 2017, in Berat it has decreased by about 2 thousand 700 votes, in Tirana it has increased by about 26 thousand votes, in Elbasan has increased by 14 thousand votes, in Korça it has decreased by 2 thousand votes, in Kukës it has decreased by 3 thousand votes, in Shkodra it has decreased by 9 thousand votes, in Lezha it has decreased by 3 thousand votes, in Vlora it has decreased by 6 thousand votes etc.

Why did the SP increase in Durrës with 3 thousand votes, where the earthquake happened, in Durrës which is a district where the DP is always good? Why did the SP fall in Korça with 2 thousand votes, e.g. or why did it fall in Vlora with 6 thousand votes, where the SP always shines? Well because in Durrës people who were mentioned above were running, money was distributed from the earthquake and people from the criminal world were in the campaign. How is the increase explained in Durrës where there is still misery from the earthquake and an increase of 3 thousand votes in Kukës where Rama built an airport?!

Even though the most significant figure is Elbasan. In Elbasan, the SP has increased by about 14 thousand votes from 72 thousand to 86 thousand votes. Elbasan lives in misery and unemployment, there is no foreign investment, no revival of economic or social life. In Elbasan this increase comes from the unusual power of crime. Why in Fier, in the most powerful district of the SP, where a large modern hospital was just built, the SP lost dramatically 13 thousand votes? In Fier, the SP did not have candidates and support from groups such as Elbasan or Durrës. It's that simple.

All this happens because Albania is an electoral authoritarianism, a country in which, as Andreas Schedler of the University of Vienna says, elections serve only to reproduce and legitimize power and not as an instrument of democracy.

The ODIHR report cannot analyze the form of the regime or the government, but everyone understands that the report speaks of elections held by a form of government that is necessarily a perverted autocracy, where power is controlled by a diabolical mechanism, which sees elections only as a means of reproducing power.

This mechanism has manipulated elections clearly and overwhelmingly. The attempt of the government not to accept any of this, or the attempt of many in public life to say that the manipulation was small and without influence and the attempt to find Rama's achievement and Basha weakness in order to defend the SP victory is only the normalization of the unthinkable, the appropriation of truth and the legitimacy of evil. This concept is used by sociologists and anthropologists to show what criminal regimes, especially totalitarian ones, do to "normalize", to normalize what happens in concentration camps or dozens of other acts of crime. In those regimes, even the greatest evil was normalized through a long bureaucratic process, but also through unstoppable propaganda. In a way, the biggest news from the report is not the manipulation of elections, but the perverse form of government, in which we have fallen, which does not even allow the identification of manipulation as such.