From the New York Times:

Austria’s Far Right Presents the E.U. With a New Test at the Polls

By ALISON SMALE and JAMES KANTER JULY 1, 2016

BERLIN — Austria’s highest court threw out the results of the nation’s presidential election on Friday, giving a far-right, euroskeptic party a second chance to win. The ruling put the European Union’s core issues back in the cross hairs of voters only a week after Britain’s decision to quit.

Citing irregularities in ballot counting, the court ordered a do-over of the presidential runoff, which an anti-immigrant candidate, Norbert Hofer, narrowly lost in May. It was the first time Austria had ordered a rerun of a national election since 1945, when the Nazis were defeated.

Until I read that last phrase “when the Nazis were defeated,” I had totally forgotten what had happened in 1945. I mean, who can remember random dates like 1945? Thanks, NYT, for using up valuable space in the second paragraph of the article to remind us of what happened in 1945.

But I wish the Times would spell out more things like this. For example, I’m a little foggy on who the Nazis were. Wasn’t there some guy from Austria who had something or other to do with 1945 and Nazis? What was his name, anyway?

Shouldn’t that paragraph have ended:

It was the first time Austria had ordered a rerun of a national election since 1945, when the Nazis, who were led by Adolf Hitler, who was born in Austria, were defeated. Hitler was bad.

What with the need to remind us about who exactly was defeated in Austria in 1945, the NYT didn’t have space to inquire into just how rare it is in Western Europe for a major election to be palpably stolen by the Establishment through vote count fraud as evidently happened here. (Text searches on the article for “scandal” or “fraud” come up blank.) Does that happen very often in advanced countries? Or was this just a special case of dire necessity because the putatively losing candidate was “anti-immigrant?”

[Comment at Unz.com]