A forward from a friend,
1. Imagine an election in a third-world country in which the self-declared
winner was the son of the former prime minister -- and imagine that the
former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation's secret
police.
2. Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote, but won
based on some old colonial holdover 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 members of that nation's most despised caste of former
slaves, 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 was himself a governor of a major
province, and that his 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.
