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Elections are supposed to be solemn affairs, the occasions when citizens in democracies exercise their right to choose those persons who will represent them in their government. It's sometimes hard to take elections as seriously as we should, though, when we witness such spectacles as dead people running for office, voters mounting write-in campaigns for fictional characters (or other ineligible candidates), or even offices that remain unfilled because no candidates venture to run for them. Still, in the unusual elections category, it's hard to top a contest reportedly won not by a human being — not even a fictional one — but by an inanimate object. Yet that's what supposedly took place in a 1967 mayoral election in the small Ecuadorian town of Picoazà — an election won by ... a foot powder. We couldn't really add much more to the story than to reproduce how news dispatches of the time reported it: Unfortunately, no U.S. newspapers carried reports of how Ecuadorian officials ultimately resolved the purported electoral snafu, and at this remove it's difficult to obtain any further information on the subject. (We've found no source for this story other than contemporaneous wire service reporting.) But at least one New York business riffed on the incident four months later to tie their advertising to upcoming local elections:
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