Sunject: How it looks to others
 

 A history professor from Uppsala Universitet in Sweden, called to tell me
 about this article she had read in which 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 phenomena.
 

 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.