Mayor Richard Daily enjoined the denizens of Chicago to vote early and often. And while it’s true that the last JFK was carried to the White House on the shoulders of corpses, this week’s elections in Afghanistan have citizens around the world scratching their heads over this thing called Democracy.

“Freedom is powerful,” boasted President Bush. “Think about a society in which young girls couldn’t go to school, and their mothers were whipped in the public square, and now they’re holding a presidential election. Due to the heroic efforts of our armed forces, Afghan women can now enjoy getting fucked in whole new ways.” Massooda Jalal, the only female on the roster, complained that the process to mark voters was rigged. “The ink that is being used can be rubbed off in a minute,” she decried, “Voters can vote 10 times!” Despite episodes of violence, voter fraud was rampant: The U.N. reported widespread cases of multiple-registration, with some Afghans in possession of four or five voter ID cards. Abdul Sirat, one of fifteen dissenting candidates complained, this “is not a legitimate election. It should be stopped and we don’t recognize the results.” Only Hamid Karzai, known here as the American puppet, endorsed the final tally. “The election was fair,” he said, adding, “this kind of thing goes on in Florida all the time.”

Indeed, it’s just that Jeb Bush is using state-of-the-art technology to bring cheating into the 21st century. Touch screens in the panhandle are routinely undercounting results, with final sums dropping around 5% of voters who activated their electronic ballots. “I have always been concerned about the undervote,” said Rebecca Mercuri, a Harvard computer expert. “We don’t know what happens with the votes because there is no real audit of the machines.” Miami-Dade county election official Orlando Suarez said a “serious bug” in the software has rendered the system virtually “unusable.”

Because the need for a paper trail is self evident, some counties are moving towards a bubble card regimen. Unfortunately, the optical scanners utilized don’t mark the cards as having gone through the reader and thus any given card can be counted multiple times. But even perfect machines cannot ensure a proper outcome. When Rob Behler recently took over a Diebold warehouse he noticed that “somebody broke in and stole fourteen of the machines and, I think, one of the servers.” He feared that with a little reprogramming, the entire election could be hijacked.

That the Bush-Halliburton administration remains in a position to again pilfer the November proceedings can only trouble those hapless members of the polity cursed with an intellect. How can the very folks who twist a CIA report debunking Saddam’s WMD aspirations and links to Al Qaeda into justification for another Vietnam capture the minds of so many? In short, it’s because while they’ve been in the White House, Bin Laden has yet to follow up on the events of September 11. Yeah, well, he hasn’t attacked France either. Not that there hasn’t been plenty of violence to go around. Witness Spain, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Russia and Egypt.

As for the French, their anti-American stance has garnered them little currency in the radical Islamic world. Two of their journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, are still held hostage in Iraq. A month after being abducted, they remain in some macabre limbo, caught somewhere between American and British contractors (beheaded after failed rescues) and Italian aid workers (successfully ransomed into freedom). When the kidnappers demanded that Chirac’s government repeal a headscarf ban in public schools, Le Figaro editorialized, “France, due to its position on the war in Iraq, could have hoped it was safe. This was not the case.” With a Muslim population pushing past 5 million, the cheese monkeys are sweating Brie. Foreign Minister Michael Barnier supplicated, “France has always rejected the vision of a clash between the West and Islam. She defends – in Iraq, in Palestine, in the near and Middle East and throughout the world – the justice and dignity of people.” The practice of groveling is lost on us Yanks, but I guess with that 35-hour work week and two months’ paid vacation the Frogs have plenty of time to suck ass.