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Election 2000 View from Overseas
A view from the other side of the fence
The View from Overseas
"A history professor from Uppsala universitet in Sweden,
called to tell me about an 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 (our 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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