Not in America
- 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).
- 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.
- Imagine that the self-declared winner's 'victory' turned
on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Not the UNITED STATES of AMERICA!
Brian L. Baker, JD, MLS
Director of the Law Library & Assistant Professor of Law
UDC David A. Clarke School of Law
bbaker@law.udc.edu www.law.udc.edu
202-274-7354 Fax: 202-274-7311
The secret of education is respecting the pupil.
Ralph Waldo Emerson