This is forwarded and I do not know the source - sorry.
Terry Cannon
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This is from an article 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 phenomena....
1. 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.
2. 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.
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 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.
Terry Cannon
Social and Economic Development Department
Natural Resources Institute
University of Greenwich
Chatham Kent ME4 4TB
Tel 44 (0)20 8331 8944
messages 44 (0)1634 883170
Fax 44 (0)1634 880066/77
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