Ylva,

The situation in a nutshell. God help us all.

Jabou

In a message dated 12/5/00 1:54:17 PM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

<< (forwarded)


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 (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 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.

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