Sure, Bush and Gore are both still standing in a ballot blizzard in Florida, chads flying every which way in the breathy wind of judges and justices. But compared to the way it could have been, this is a cakewalk. Here in enlightened America, we at least have courts and duly authorized officials figuring out who's going to lead the nation. Other countries may joke about sending election monitors our way, but theirs is the humor of desperation. For proof, let's take a look at some election-related news from around the world.

Just this week, CNN reported that "At least seven people were killed in shootings and other violence at or near polling stations Tuesday during South Africa's municipal elections, the second since the end of apartheid." Worse is Ivory Coast, where at least 22 people died this week during what Reuters called "pre-election political and ethnic violence." A former prime minister was excluded from the poll by Ivory Coast's supreme court; as a result, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called off UN electoral assistance, police fired tear gas at protesters, and residents were placed under curfew.

Sounds a little bit like what happened only a couple of months ago in Yugoslavia -- remember that it took streets filled with Belgraders to persuade the reviled Slobodan Milosevic that maybe he really did lose that country's presidential election after all. However gingerly Bill Clinton will have to leave Washington, at least he won't literally have to run for his life.

Ultranationalism may be a problem in America when bigots like Pat Buchanan can run for president, but he finished with less than one percent of the vote. In Romania, candidate Corneliu Vadim Tudor got 28 percent of the vote in a Nov. 26 presidential primary; he's now the number-two man in the race, despite what the Boston Globe on Wednesday called his "history of vituperative attacks on enemies real and perceived -- Jews, Hungarians, Gypsies, political rivals." (Sort of hard to root for Tudor's opponent, though, seeing as how he's an old-style Communist dictator.) Far-right candidates said to have Nazi sympathies recently took charge of the Austrian government, prompting other countries in Europe to take the unprecedented and unambiguous step of cutting diplomatic relations. And let's not even begin analyzing Russia's KGB chief-turned-president, who wants to dust off the Soviet flag and national anthem.

Government machinations? In Tanzania, corruption is so widespread and openly acknowledged -- opposition politicans are routinely arrested -- that the new president has had to form an investigative commission. Most politicians in Sudan aren't even bothering to run in their country's questionable election, to be held next month. Things aren't much better in Haiti, where President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was "elected" by American troops in 1994 (a little military adventure called "Operation Uphold Democracy"), recently rigged his own re-election, winning some 92% of the vote (the second-place finisher garnered a mere 2%). As in Sudan, most potential opponents -- wisely? -- sat the day out.

Even some of our closest allies aren't above a little electoral meddling. In Taiwan, the long- ruling Kuomintang party, upset at losing big in March elections, has tried every which way to throw wrenches at "embattled" President Chen Shui-bian. Still, although Chen is under attack at home and by a billion Chinese mainlanders, he's faring better than Japan's prime minister, Yoshiro Mori, who survived a no-confidence vote orchestrated against him last month only after an embarrassing combination of pleading and political string-pulling. In Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Barak, having failed to keep peace with the Palestinians and within his own government, has been forced to call early elections as his ruling coalition collapses; Temple Mount-visiting right-winger Ariel Sharon, who obviously keeps peace pretty low on his agenda, is delighted. And Canada, of all countries, also recently called early elections -- a ploy by wily Prime Minister Jean Chretien to get re-elected before the opposition got too strong.

Let's see; we're up to coups, impeachments, and resignations. In Pakistan, it's been over a year since Gen. Pervez Musharraf and company booted duly elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and sent him packing for prison; new elections are nowhere on the horizon. (Don't forget that Boston TV reporter Andy Hiller quizzed our own George W. Bush on this guy's name; Bush answered, "General.") The Philippines is at this moment enjoying the spectacle of its apparently fast-and-loose president, Joseph Estrada, being paraded in front of the Philippine Senate in an impeachment trial that makes Clinton's look like a lovefest. Peru's Alberto Fujimori would have faced similar music if he hadn't faxed -- faxed -- his resignation from a Tokyo hotel room.

Free and fair elections are still just myths (if not banned concepts) in many countries around the world, and even sometimes when they're rumored to take place, it's hard to prove. Despite the election of reformist Muhammad Khatami in Iran, fundamentalist clerics still pretty much rule there, as in Afghanistan, whose hard-liners are notorious for their uncompromising and often lethal conservatism. Zimbabwe's leader, Robert Mugabe, may have been elected but is now running amok even as his party and his country's economy plunge into chaos, ignoring a Supreme Court that has ruled his radical land-redistribution "plan," which has produced nationwide violence, illegal. (Not to mention that last month's Zimbabwean elections were characterized by the usual beatings and shootings.)

All this, all throughout the globe. And wee Americans have the effrontery to express disgust at our own courtroom wranglings. Please. Let them wrangle.

Actually, only one nation has stood alone in recent months for conducting a reasonably efficient and honorable election. That is Mexico, where voters in July elected opposition candidate Vicente Fox, who was inaugurated last Friday. Fox's election ended 71 years of rule under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had kept power through all the usual means -- trickery, fraud, intimidation, even assassinations. Only because the PRI's last president, Ernesto Zedillo, was intent on reforming the "adjectives" -- dictatorial, artificial, useless -- out of Mexican democracy did politics there begin to change. The country still has some way to go (violence in the summer campaign and beyond was still not uncommon), but great strides have been made -- Fox, for instance, benefited greatly from (gasp!) public campaign financing.

On July 4, after Fox's election, the New York Times said of Zedillo: "His policies amounted to an ultimatum. No longer was it the domineering PRI elite's job to spread the spoils. The president wanted the party to work for its votes." We in the United States may be able to learn from that. And the rest of the world -- well, the rest of the world has a lot more to learn.