CDR: Imagine

No User no.user at anon.xg.nu
Mon Nov 27 19:31:37 PST 2000



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." 





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