A Reuters story today claims that dead candidates won
elections last night in Florida and Alabama by comfortable margins. Now, this
may sound fishy to some people, but I have lived down South, and I can tell you
this is just a bit of local tradition. When I lived in Mobile, Alabama, dead
people were always winning elected office. And it was awful, because then we’d
have to dig them up and swear them in, and not only did they smell bad, they
didn’t even get anything done, either! But I guess that’s better than a corrupt
politician swindling the taxpayers any day. And it sure was fun to see the
faces of the candidates who lost. (I think that’s why they really do it.)
It may seem strange to outsiders that Florida and Alabama
are always electing dead people, but it’s really the campaign they run that
gets them all the votes. What their campaign people do is sit their candidate’s
corpse in a chair, and then they make an ad showing them dead in the chair, and
a spooky voice-over says something like: “Vote for me, or I’ll haunt you to the
grave!” Well, people down there can be kind of superstitious (like most
Americans, actually), so they’d rather be safe than sorry. (The funny thing is,
they get haunted anyway, or so I hear, because the dead guy wanted to rest in
peace, and now he has to govern!)
Here’s the haunting story:
BTW: This is just a joke in bad taste, and I apologize in
advance to those offended. But in this article, a candidate who lost to a dead
guy said: “It is a touchy situation. When you are running against a dead man,
you are limited as to what you can say.” That may be true, but you can also say
things you can’t usually say in an election, like: “Do you really want a dead
guy to represent you?” I think he may have missed his opportunity to say that,
seeing as how he lost.
