A Third World Point of View on the US Elections

Date: 11/20/00 9:10 AM

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 phenomenon:

1.  Imagine that we read of an election occuring 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 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.