Comments from a Swedish scholar:
>
> 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/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."
>