The US election from a Third World perspective ...
In our media, we hear daily events of third-world, and or, politically struggling countries fraudulant activities when it comes to elections. how corrupt 'other' people are, but it is not much different here in the US. Our children should study this event closely for it shows that Political Fraud IS NOT only a third world phenomena, it is strong here in the US.
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 (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 and or
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 agovernor 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.
