An alternative view, through the looking glass. 1. Imagine an election in a country dominated by a political machine. The campaign of the self-declared winner is managed by the son of famous machine politican, the father having stolen a previous national election through vote fraud. 2. The self-declared winner is the son of a former senator. The father was closely allied with one of the world's richest, most secretive and sleaziest businessmen, someone who made business deals with the country's arch-enemy and laundered the funds from the deals to fund the enemy's spies within his own country. 3. Imagine that the nation's press corps covering the elction are near-universally members of the self-declared winner's party, and downplayed any suggestion of vote fraud or other irregularities. 4. Imagine that the self-declared winner used political and legal leverage to make sure votes in only certain favorable locales were subjected to a recount by hand, and that the recount method maximized subjective discretion and political manipulation. 5. Imagine that the self-declared winner was second-in-command during the election to a leader who had perfected the art of character assassination (especially of of troublesome women), and that the self-declared winner used the same process to discredit those opposing him in the election. 6. Imagine the self-decribed winner endorsing the notion that the province and its subdivisions be permitted to conduct recounts under relevant law, then putting political pressure on subdivisions that chose not to conduct a recount and legal pressure on provincial officials who do not agree with him. NOTE: I do not find the above particularly fairminded, even if I wrote it. But the earlier version was also propaganda. The main issue in this election is simply this: a near-tie exceeds, in engineering terms, the tolerances of our political, electoral and legal structures. That is a big problem, to be sure, and creates a real legitimacy issue that partisans on both sides are doing nothing to rectify. But the problem came about via an almost perfectly calibrated appeal to the political center, and spinning the resulting chaos in conspiratorial sixties terms is ludicrous. Jeff Apfel
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