circa 2000

Apparently referencing an article in which a Zimbabwe politician was quoted as saying that children should study this event (the GWB "election", er, selection) closely for it shows that election fraud is not only a phenomenon of the developing world.

"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 leader and that former leader 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, and that the person in charge of certifying the votes, the campaign leader for the self-declared winner, did everything possible to block even a recount of votes cast.

4a. Imagine that the ballot was actually illegal by state law, and that when the committe in charge of ballots met, the person who constructed the ballot "went to the bathroom: and never had it cleared.

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."

circa 2004, much easier this time

just get your buddies on the voting machine companies to lobby hard for no paper trail and sell a bunch of crappy unreliable machines to everyone you can and then just jack the damn thing and call everybody whiners who says otherwise. read more here and here. very depressing. but then again maybe it had to happen.