1. Imagine
reading 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 intelligence organization.
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-democratic
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 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 official preventing a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting
of the ballots in the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed
district was a key supporter of the self-declared winner's political
party in that province.
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-democratic peoples in some strange "elsewhere."
Postscript:
Imagine also that officials of the party of the self-declared winner
had directed that crowds of protesters be organized and sent as an angry
mob to harass and intimidate civil servants engaged in the counting
of the vote - an action that, to readers of history, brought to mind
Hitler's use of the Brown Shirts against his democratic opponents in
the 1930s.
