Yemen's 2006 presidential election, it was said, would be different from past contests in which the winner's margin of victory was laughably large. It would prove to outsiders that Yemen could hold an election that was both fiercely contested and fair. The unspoken caveat: voters would still return the incumbent, who has ruled in Yemen for 28 years, for yet another term in office. The dissonance between these two expectations -- both of them fulfilled -- allowed both optimists and skeptics to see in the September 20 balloting what they wanted to see.

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