COMMUNITIES AGAINST CAPITALISM
 

  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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Visit "Resources for Democracy" at http://bozeman.bigsky.net/drusha