Sunday was election day in Belarus and shortly after voting ended the government announced the results of an exit poll which said President Aleksandr Lukashenko, who has been in office since 1994, would win another term. That didn’t sit well with a lot of people including Sec. of State Mike Pompeo:
On Monday, the Belarusian Central Election Commission declared that Lukashenko had won with 80.23 percent of the vote to [opposition candidate Svetlana] Tikhanovskaya’s 9.9 percent, with the remaining votes split between three other candidates. Tikhanovskaya rejected the election results and said her team would do everything they could to challenge them. Exit polls conducted outside of Belarusian Embassies in 19 countries with large diasporas suggested that Tikhanovskaya received almost 80 percent of the vote while results from some of Minsk’s more reliable polling stations also put the opposition candidate in the lead. In a statement on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: “The United States is deeply concerned about the conduct of the August 9 presidential election in Belarus, which was not free and fair.”
