From: Derek Robinson (nnvsnu@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Dec 13 2000 - 02:37:18 PST
the following was passed on without source:
---snip---
A Zimbabwe politician was quoted as saying that children should study
the US election event closely because it shows that election fraud is
not only a third world phenomena. To illustrate the point, he made the
following comments:
"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 (the CIA).
Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won
based on some old colonial holdover from the nation's pre-democracy past
(the electoral college).
Imagine that the self-declared winner's 'victory' turned on disputed
votes cast in a province governed by his brother!
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.
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.
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.
Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and that
the self-declared winner's 'lead' was only 537 votes. Fewer, certainly,
than the vote counting machines' margin of error.
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.
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, predominantly of
members of that most hated caste.
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, faraway
elsewhere.
---snip---
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