[: hacktivism :]

Pretty scary... Imagine ...

1. Imagine an election in a third-world country in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister - and imagine that the former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation's secret police.

2. Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote, but won based on some old colonial holdover 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 of former slaves, 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 was himself a governor of a major province, and that his 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.