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The Obama administration said Thursday that the election of Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev to an unprecedented third term fell short of international standards, the Washington Times reports. On Election Day, procedural irregularities were observed including ballot box stuffing, serious problems with vote counting and failure to record the number of received ballots, as deputy State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf stated.

Azerbaijan’s national election commission announced that Mr. Aliyev had won nearly 85 percent of the votes that had been counted. The main opposition candidate, Jamil Hasanli, had picked up 5.2 percent of the vote. “Since coming to power, the younger Mr. Aliyev has cracked down on the opposition and scrapped term limits for the presidency,” the Washington Times reports.

“Azerbaijani strongman Ilham Aliyev on Thursday hailed as a "triumph of democracy" a landslide election victory.” It further extended the ruling dynasty's grip on power but OSCE observers complained the vote was marred by serious problems, the Agence France-Presse reports.

According to the agency the observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said the vote was marred by "significant problems" and "underscored the serious nature of the shortcomings that need to be addressed" for Azerbaijan to meet its commitments. Report of the OSCE slammed a lack of guarantee of a "level playing field" for candidates and said that the vote count was "assessed in overwhelmingly negative terms, with 58 per cent of observed polling stations assessed as bad or very bad" the AFP writes.

The New York Times stresses that critics, however, say Mr. Aliyev is a heavy-handed autocrat in a country that has a poor record on human rights. “After securing the referendum in 2009 that lifted term limits, Mr. Aliyev portrayed his re-election as a foregone conclusion. He did virtually no campaigning and did not participate in debates, sending representatives in his place,” the article reads.
According to the Reuters Azerbaijani opposition does not recognize the election results and is going to contend the results. The opposition has scheduled a meeting on Saturday.

In its turn IWPR published an article which notes that some voters had to arrive at a polling station to discover that someone had already voted in their name. A woman was suggested to take a ballot paper and vote in someone else’s name.

Jasur Sumerinli, another IWPR contributor, saw a group of school pupils being brought in to vote at Polling Station. When he tried to ascertain whether they were eligible to vote, he was expelled from the polling station.