Completely OT--election related

[Joywitch]

No: HPFGUIDX 6143

I know you will all hate me for making this now-forbidden election-
related post, but I will bear my punishment witchfully because I just 
could not resist -- Joywitch

Fwd: 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 ofthat 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 
disputedvotes 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 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 state police operating under the authority of the 
self-declared winner's brother intercepted hundreds of members of 
thatmost-despised caste on their way to the polls.

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 
opposeda more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the 
ballots in thedisputed 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 nationand 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 onthe 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.