Third World

"A history professor from Uppsala University 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 (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 first cousin of the self-declared winner worked for aforeign owned media outlet, and that media outlet declared -- prematurely and incorrectly -- that the self declared winner (the former prime minister's son), was the new president.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despisedcaste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner's brother.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a governor ofa major province, had the worst human rights record of any province in his nation and actually led the nation in executions.

11. 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.

12. Imagine that the advisors to the self-declared winner counseled thelegislators in the province ruled by the self-declared winner's brother thatthey should ignore the edict of the highest court in the province regarding election laws, and that they should seize the initiative to declare the self-declared winner the winner, regardless of the judicial process or rule of law.


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."