Word: ballotings
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...conduct free and fair democratic elections [April 30]. There was democracy in Nigeria before, and there can be again. We have not only politicians to blame for this disgraceful situation but also those shortsighted individuals who mastermind ways to rig the voting process-burning electoral offices, stealing and stuffing ballot boxes-all in a bid to make money that won't get them past the weekend. Sheye Lawal, London
That was then. But when Nigerians went to the polls again last month, democracy lost. In an orgy of ballot-box stuffing and violence, punctuated by an attempted truck bombing of the electoral-commission headquarters, the ruling party won what some observers thought was the most fraudulent election ever in Nigeria--which is saying something. Once again, Nigeria is catching a wave. From Bangladesh to Thailand to Russia, political freedom is in retreat. In a book due out this fall, Hoover Institution political scientist Larry Diamond notes that "we have entered a period of global democratic recession...
...That clash came to a head on May 1 when Turkey's Constitutional Court annulled the first round of elections in Parliament that would have made Gul President. Handpicked by his longtime ally Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Gul was ahead in the ballot, but the court, in a ruling that appeared to betray its secularist bias, upheld claims by Turkey's main secularist political party that the balloting was unconstitutional because a quorum wasn't present-no matter that the opposition engineered that shortfall by boycotting the vote, or that at least one President had previously been elected with...
...Clinton. And McCain and Giuliani have an advantage that, say, Vice President Humphrey didn't have in 1968. They aren't much associated with the Bush Administration, and they might be able to turn their election campaign into a referendum on the future. Bush won't be on the ballot--though Democrats will try to wrap him around the neck of the G.O.P. nominee. But that nominee might be able to dodge that bullet, combining strong Commander in Chief credentials with enough of a message of change. There is current evidence that this won't be impossible...
...Both of them talk about protecting us - the mother protector and the father protector," says Renaud Gaultier, an industrial designer in Paris. "I have a mother and father; I'm an adult, and I don't need this infantile discourse." Gaultier says he'll drop an unmarked ballot into the box on May 6, and he won't be the only Bayrou adherent to exercise that civic protest against what he sees as a choice between second-raters. Such tactics may assuage the conscience, but they're unlikely to change the outcome of the May 6 vote; they even seem...