An interesting take on the situation.....

Comments from a Swedish scholar:
<
< 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 (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.
<
< 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."
<