Satire
America: A Third World Country?
December 10, 2000
An African 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
favouring 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 327 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.
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 third world struggle.
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