[lfjokes] 'kay not really a joke ...

[Adam Shand]

... but you get it anyway.  ha!  take it and like it. :)  (note: the notes
in the message were already attached, they are not mine).

From: Herr Nagengast <todd at gnosh.net>
Via: The GRAVY letter, edited by James Bradley.

The View from Overseas

"A history professor from Uppsala universitet in Sweden, called to tell me
about an article she had read in which a Zimbabwe politician was quoted as
saying that children should study this event closely for it shows that
election fraud is not only a third world phenomena.

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 (our 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.

  [NOTE: I find it amusing that this keeps being used as a blast against
  Republicans because those ballots were designed by a Democrat -
  specifically to help elderly voters who claimed they were confused by
  the old ballots.  Of course, that would not stop the press from using it
  as a sensational headline.]


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.

  [NOTE: Last time I checked, the machine margin-of-error was between 1% & 
  5%, easily more than 300+ (or 900+ after absentee ballots).  But the 
  margin-of-error for hand counting was significantly greater than 10%, or 
  more than double the machine's error, at BEST.  But of course, according
  to the Democrats, we should still recount the districts where Gore has
  the highest probability of gaining votes, and only those districts.]


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.

  [NOTE: I am not sure that is a Bad Thing. :-]

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.

  [NOTE: Okie, even I admit that is a Bad Thing - which is why I want Gore
  to win.  (I am sure many of you are surprised.)  But I do not want my
  choice for president to prevail at the expense of our electoral system.]

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."

Dagney C. Ernest,
Arts and Entertainmentant

Courier-Gazette
P.O. Box 249
Rockland, ME 04841

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