Today a new president of the US is sworn in. For some time the following e-mail has been in circulation. Farfetched? "Imagine an election occurring anywhere in the Third World in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister who was himself the former head of the secret police/intelligence agency. Imagine that the winner lost the popular vote, but won based on some old colonial holdover from the nation's pre-democracy past - the electoral college. Imagine that the victory turned on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother. Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, which heavily favoured the winner's opponent, led thousands to vote for the wrong candidate. Imagine that members of the most despised caste turned out in record numbers to oppose the winner and that hundreds were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the brother. Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and that the winner's lead was only 327 votes, fewer than the machines' margin of error.
"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."
Quidnunc is rholohan@irish-times.ie