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.
