The Florida Long Count

Imagine That

If the things that happened in Florida on Election Day happened anywhere in the world beside the United States, what would you think?

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).
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.
The self-declared winner's "victory" turned on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother.
The self-declared had been announced as the winner in the disputed province by a member of his own family, working for a television network that actively supported his political viewpoint and consistently attacked other political viewpoints.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-democratic regime in some strange elsewhere.