From: "Drusha L. Mayhue" <drusha@bigsky.net>
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excerpted from a Zimbabwean newspaper
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A view from the "developing" world
From an article 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 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 the 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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