Rigged Vote Is Widely Expected in Pakistan

Given all of that, Mehboob said, Musharraf "has every incentive to rig."

There is evidence that Musharraf's backers -- they have controlled Parliament since winning power in a discredited 2002 vote -- would be swept from office in a fair election. A September opinion poll by the U.S.-based International Republican Institute found that just 21 percent of Pakistanis approved of Musharraf's job performance. Just 16 percent said they intended to vote for Musharraf's faction of the Pakistan Muslim League.

But in Pakistan's 60-year history, the will of the people has rarely had much bearing on who rules the country. Stealing elections is a virtual art form, and all of the major political players know exactly how it's done.

There are many ways. The electoral rolls, for instance, are believed to be highly inaccurate, despite a multimillion-dollar effort to scrub them clean that was largely funded by Washington. As Sarwar Bari, who leads Pakistan's nonprofit Free and Fair Elections Network, said: "There are a lot of fake names and dead people's names on the rolls."

Another potential source of fraud lies in the hands of the local officials who oversee the elections. The government has been transferring loyalists into key constituencies to make sure it has allies where they are needed most.

In Rawalpindi, the garrison city just south of Islamabad, the mustachioed face of former federal minister Sheikh Rashid gazes down from posters on virtually every lamppost. But one of Rashid's opponents for Parliament, a pharmacist-turned-politician named Hanif Abbasi, has charged that city employees, rather than Rashid's supporters, put up the posters.

The city's mayor happens to be Rashid's nephew, and Abbasi insists that Rashid uses the relationship to his advantage at every turn. Abbasi lodged a complaint with the election commission last week. "But I don't expect anything," he said. "All over the country, there are the same kinds of complaints."

Rashid dismissed the accusation, saying it would be impossible for his nephew to use city resources to help his campaign because there are too many people watching. Other Musharraf loyalists, as well as some Western diplomats, have made similar arguments about the overall integrity of the elections, saying the process will be under such intense scrutiny that it will be tough to rig.

But an international elections expert in Pakistan, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, called that idea "a joke" because the people who are supposed to be scrutinizing the elections have been muzzled.

Since Musharraf packed the courts with loyalists, there are no independent judges to punish abuses. The top TV news station has been taken off the air; stations that continue to broadcast do so under a tough new media law that makes it a crime, punishable with prison, for anyone to criticize Musharraf on the air. The law will remain even after Musharraf lifts the emergency, which he is expected to do Saturday.

Meanwhile, the foreign presence in Pakistan is comparatively light: On election day, there will be, at most, a couple of hundred international observers in a country with tens of thousands of polling places.

"The eyes of the world will be on Pakistan," the expert said. "But they won't be in Pakistan."

Special correspondent Imtiaz Ali in Peshawar contributed to this report.