[Announce-DAN] Hmmm

[Doc Rosen <drdrdoc@dr.com>]

A history professor from Uppsala University in Sweden,read an article in
which a Zimbabwe politician was quoted as saying that children should
study what is going on in the U.S. elections closely for it shows that
election fraud is not only a third world phenomena.

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 x-file 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. if such
an 
election were held in the third world, I imagine that we wouldall expect
to see the 
Kofi Annan to arrive waving the famous UN sky-blue banner of world peace
and making 
promises of new and fair elections. Perhaps a fleet of sky-blue
helicopters 
blaring the ode to joy in a kind of anti-apocalypse now moment. Oh happy
day. Perhaps the 
secretary general himself might ask x-pres. Jimmy Carter to observe the
election. 
Perhaps some of us on this very list might join various fact finding
missions and write articles 
about great third world adventures of democracy. What is to be done? 
Anyone have 
Kofi Annan's cell phone number?


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