The World: The Making of a Loser

• Share

VIETNAMESE who trooped faithfully to the polls across South Viet Nam last week had in many cases to make choices that might have left a Univac smoking. No fewer than 1,297 candidates were vying for 159 seats in the often rambunctious Lower House of the National Assembly. In one Saigon district, for example, voters had to sift through a sheaf of 81 ballots, each printed with a candidate's photograph and symbol, and choose five to seal in a little brown envelope, which then was dropped in a ballot box. In a number of areas, moreover, voters who wanted to register antigovernment sentiments found that balloting was not only a complex procedure but also ultimately superfluous. Except in some northern and coastal provinces that returned opposition candidates in unexpected strength, many of the polls seem to have been staffed by officials who believed strongly in what Will Rogers used to call "the old political mode of counting-two for me and one for you."

What did it all prove? Primarily that South Viet Nam's ruling politicians have imbibed only sparingly of the spirit of democracy, while adopting every trick in the freewheeling history of American ward politics and adding some new wrinkles of their own. On election day, TIME Correspondent Rudolph Rauch made a tour of the Mekong Delta province of Vinh Binh, where the government seemed particularly intent on making certain that popular Opposition Deputy Ngo Cong Duc lost (TIME, Sept. 6). Rauch's report:

The most striking thing about the polling in Vinh Binh was the thoroughness with which the ground had been prepared. There was no atmosphere of terror, but rather a palpable feeling of unease and fear that made it easy to persuade people not to see what they were looking at, not to hear what was said -in short, not to interfere. That atmosphere hung heavy at Dinh Binh, a tiny hamlet two miles down a mud footpath from the nearest village big enough to have a helicopter pad. At high noon, clusters of Vietnamese stood idly between the Catholic church and the school that housed the polling stations. Why was no one voting? "It's lunchtime," a national policeman explained. Reminded that the polls were to be open from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. with no break for lunch, the cop barked into his walkie-talkie, then grunted an order. The people in the square lined up and began moving into the school building. "They're voting now," the policeman smiled.

Inside one of the village's three polling stations, a row of men sat against the far wall clipping corners off voters' registration cards. There were stacks of cards on the table in front of them -far more cards than there were people in the room. Although the law says that voters must bring their cards with them when they come to vote and that they must take them with them when they leave, very few voters left with cards. "Security," explained the election supervisor. A Viet Cong might steal a voting card and unlawfully exercise a registered voter's franchise. "So we keep the cards in a safe place and give them out again before the presidential election," said the official.