CDR: Re: Imagine

Ken Brown k.brown at ccs.bbk.ac.uk
Tue Nov 28 03:45:29 PST 2000


No User wrote:
 
> 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).

[...snip...]

Which is exactly what the current US situation looks like to most people
outside the US. It presumably seems different to the Americans
themselves (or at least the Republican voters amongst them), but to the
rest of us the whole thing cuts heavily at Bush's credibility

Ken

 
> 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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