Romanian Village Elects Dead Mayor
Linked from the home page of the BBC World News online today was an article about how the Romanian village of Voinesti re-elected their mayor of 2 decades despite the fact that he died the night before the election.
Now I am not quite sure this is worthy of front page news, but I think it’s clear that whom ever wrote and posted the article to the site thought that they would show the Romanians up for the kinds of backwards peasants they are perceived to be.
If anything, to me, this says more about the quality of journalism and where it is going at news.bbc.co.uk than it says about the Romanians. Frankly speaking, if you put yourself in the shoes of a villager, maybe you didn’t want your vote to be counted in favour of the only surviving candidate and to state that you preferred the party of the late candidate, rather than to merely spoil the ballot or vote for no one.
Rather than lampooning the “dumb” Romanians, the BBC should be lauding the villagers and criticising the electoral commissions, whose credibility and impartiality I doubt, for automatically handing the election to the dead candidates opponent.
