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EARTHDATE: June 22, 2008

Official News page 5


REAL LIFE ELECTION NEWS

by Hazed

Leaving aside the Obama vs Clinton campaign which went on for what seemed like centuries, there's two important pieces of election news affecting smaller areas...


Dead Mayor Walking

At a recent mayoral election in Romania, villagers voted in a dead man. What's more, they knew he was dead when they voted for him - but they preferred him to his live opponent.

Neculai Ivascu was 57 years old and had run the village (which was not named in the news report I read) for almost twenty years. Sadly, he died from liver disease just after the polls opened. A local official said the authorities decided to keep the poll open in case his opponent, Gheorghe Dobrecsu, won, thus avoiding the need for a re-run - but the dead man won by a margin of 23 votes.

"I know he died, but I don't want to change," said one of Ivascu's supporters on Romanian television.

In the end, the post was given to the runner-up, but some villagers are furious and are calling for a new vote.

Imagine how humiliated Gheorghe must feel - he can't even win against a corpse!


Entire Town Forgets to Vote

It's not just obscure foreign villages where electoral embarrassments happen. A small town in America is also left with a puzzling result to its mayoral election. In this case, the problem is that nobody turned out to vote - not even the candidates!

The town is Pillsbury, in Barnes County, North Dakota, a small farming town where only about 11 people live in the town itself, and the remaining residents live on farms outside the city. The current mayor, Darrel Brudevold, said voter turnout in the city's primary election is usually fairly high: "I dare say a half-dozen people usually make it to the polls," he explained. But not this time.

In the election on June 10, Brudevold was running unopposed for mayor, and two other candidates (one of them his wife) were also standing without opposition for alderman seats. Maybe with no choice, the voters figured it wasn't worth bothering, but not even the candidates could make the effort.

Brudevold said he intended to vote, but that he had crops to tend. His wife runs the beauty shop and is the town's postmaster; she said she was far too busy to make it down to the polls. Despite the dismal turn-out, they will all stay in their posts. I do hope they manage to find the time to attend to the town's business - the council meets about five times a year.


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