From: brew@thedailybrew.com
A Zimbabwe politician was quoted as saying that children should study
this
event closely for it shows that election fraud is not only a third
world phenomenon...
1. Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the
third
world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former
prime
minister and that former prime minister was himself the former head
of that
nation's secret police (CIA).
2. Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote
but won
based on some old colonial holdover (electoral college) from the nation's
pre-democracy past.
3. Imagine that the self-declared winner's 'victory' turned on
disputed
votes cast in a province governed by his brother!
4. Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a
district
heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands
of
voters to vote for the wrong candidate.
5. Imagine that that members of that nation's most despised caste,
fearing
for their lives/livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in
near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy.
6. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most- despised caste
were
intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under
the
authority of the self-declared winner's brother.
7. Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province
and that
the self-declared winner's 'lead' was only 327 votes. Fewer,
certainly,
than the vote counting machines' margin of error.
8. Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party
opposed a
more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the
disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district.
9. Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a governor of
a major
province, had the worst human rights record of any province in his
nation
and actually led the nation in executions.
10. Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner
was to
appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on
the high
court of that nation.
None of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything
other than the self-declared winner's will-to-power. All of us,
I imagine,
would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of
pitiful
pre- or anti-democracy peoples in some strange elsewhere.