ENSCHEDE, Netherlands – Given it was a lesbian porn video at issue in the incident, I suppose it would be off-base to say circumstance gives new meaning to the term “hanging chads,” but a porn-rooted practical joke played at a polling station in the Netherlands certainly added some unexpected flavor to a much-anticipated election.
While most interested observers outside the Netherlands were concerned primarily with whether right-wing candidate Geert Wilders would win out over Prime Minister Mark Rutte, vote counters at a polling station in Enschede must have been fully engaged in the task at hand. Otherwise, one assumes they would have noticed the porn video playing on a large pull-down screen right behind them.
A saloon belonging to a local football club was the venue for the polling station, and members of the club claim to have been behind the prank. In a faint echo of the current American president, the person who took the photo that later went viral described the practical joke as “locker room humor.”
“Only a snapshot, just a joke,” the man said of the decision to run the video while the pollsters worked. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
Prank though it may have been, a spokesperson for the Enschede Mayor’s office didn’t seem to find much humor in the occasion, or the unwanted attention it has drawn to the city.
“This was no Photoshop,” the spokesperson said. “Of course this does not deserve any praise and should never have happened. “They have sworn to us it will never happen again.”
Local authorities in Enschede claim the (roughly one-minute) display of porn didn’t distract the vote counters from their purpose — which is a good thing, seeing as how the election involved 1,114 candidates from 28 different parties. The act tallying the votes was plenty complicated even without the unanticipated addition of lesbian porn.
While it appears to be a no harm/no foul situation, Hans Scholten, head of the football club, still had some smoothing over to do in the aftermath.
“Even though it is a joke, the consequence for the city and the club were not thought through,” Scholten said. We have a well-regarded name as a club, and this is important for members and parents.”
All in all, though, the response to this incident seems quite measured, especially compared to what likely would have happen had a similar prank played out in an American polling station.
Just picture it: In the wake of a surprising election outcome, it’s revealed vote counters in one of the Rust Belt states were working in a room with porn displayed on a video screen. How would American office-seekers react?
Before even knowing whether he’d come out on top in the vote, I think it’s safe to say Donald Trump would tweet about it being “very unfair” for votes to be counted in a room with lesbian porn on the screen, because this implies one of the vote-counters liked lesbian porn, which means one of them could be a lesbian. Obviously, anyone of this bent is likely to be a vote in the Crooked Hillary column, so all this counting must stop right now until the American government can figure out what the hell is going on.
Later, when it turns out he’s taken more votes in the precinct than his opponent, Trump would declare reports of the porn video to be “fake news” and immediately call for a congressional investigation into whether Barrack Obama ordered CNN to cover the story to help reduce the eventual attendance at Trump’s inauguration, and to check on a Breitbart report claiming the “so-called lesbians” were really paid protesters and the whole sorry affair was nothing but vile, liberal propaganda bankrolled by George Soros.
Clinton, meanwhile, would decry the hostile work environment created by the display of porn, while at the same time praise as “courageous and noble Americans” the volunteer campaign workers who managed to keep toiling in the face of such erotic adversity.
After flying in for a quick fact-finding mission, Clinton would report her helicopter landed amid automatic gunfire coming from “a vast right-wing conspiracy” located near the heliport. Later, after reports Clinton arrived in a large caravan of armor-plated SUVs and not a helicopter, and there were no reports of gunfire heard by anyone else in the area, Clinton might say she “misspoke” and blame the whole thing on an anti-Islam video uploaded to YouTube the previous week.
Thankfully, Geert Wilders thus far hasn’t blamed Mark Rutte’s victory on the porn video – but I’m not foreclosing on the possibility just yet. After all, should Wilders come to find out one of the performers in the lesbian clip is a Syrian, all bets are off.
