It was a simple and unoriginal idea.
Stick your finger in the indelible ink, then see how easily it washes off.
Across Afghanistan, the plan was to prevent repeat voting by putting this ink on the right index finger of each person brave enough to vote.
There were drawbacks; the Taliban had threatened to hang, behead, or remove the finger of anyone caught with such a stain.
But there was another more complicated problem.
At the polling station I was at, the presidential candidate Ramazan Bashardost was frantically passing the bleach around.
A man grabbed my hand, and thrust my little finger into the bleach bottle. You could feel the active chemicals buzzing away, and a few minutes later, the ink appeared to have gone.
A slight residue at the bottom of where it previously was – nearer the knuckle – but to all intents and purposes, it was gone.
Cue mass fury from the Bashardost camp. The election must be stopped – we’re off to the election commission.
But it gets a little more complicated. The ink vanished long enough to allow a decent repeat vote – about an hour – but then it came back with avengeance.
The end of my pinkie is now black and blue.
Other stories include people who have tried to remove it with nail varnish remover to find it’s also turned black. The black stuff is not going anywhere for now.
So here’s the rub: vote, and then get inked. That’s fine. Unless you run into the Taliban. Vote, get inked, and try and wash it off, simply because you don’t like the idea of being punished by the insurgency, and you get an even tougher stain, that endures for quite some time.
As everyone says, this election was always going to be “imperfect”.
It’s just – to me – hard to feel democracy is really at work, in that free, fair and expressive way we in the west believe it should attain effortlessly, if you have to weigh up the threat of violence before you vote.
And hope the ink washes off your finger faster than it does.