A FOREIGN PERSPECTIVE ON THE FLORIDA IMBROGLIO

A Zimbabwe politician has been quoted as saying that children should
study this year's U.S. presidential election closely, because it shows
that election fraud is not only a third world phenomena. In that spirit,
consider the recent proceedings from a slightly different perspective:

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 colonial holdover (Electoral College) from the
nation's 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 300 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 was himself the governor
of a major province, which had the worst human rights record of any
province in his nation and which 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.


Few 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.


THIS REMINDS ME OF GANDHI'S REPUTED RESPONSE TO A QUESTION POSED BY A
BRITISH JOURNALIST AFTER GANDHI RETURNED FROM A TOUR OF EUROPEAN
CAPITALS.

"What," he was asked, "do you think about Western Civilization?"

"I think," he replied, "it would be a very good idea."