Sudan, Britain and democracy

[fpb]

Sudan, a country that has spent the last generation under a bloody tyranny and fighting a civil war, recently had a general election. More electors turned up than the facilities were able to handle; so, by common consent, the electoral commission allowed the polls to stay open for an extra day. In spite of widespread fears, there seems to have been no violence, and everyone who wanted to vote was able to.

Britons were called to vote yesterday. For God knows what reason, unexpected numbers of electors - no less than 20% more than last time - showed up to vote, mostly for the same discredited cretins that have so mismanaged the country for the last several decades. This submissiveness of the electorate was properly rewarded by the authorities, who closed the polls at 10 in the evening, depriving thousands, maybe tens of thousands of would-be electors of their democratic rights.

Sudan gives Britain lessons in democracy. And the British, being idiots enough to reward the villainous three leading parties for their villainy, deserve the insult. They will pay for it, too, when the monsters who have destroyed British manufacturing, devastated British society, run up a debt that makes Greece's seem small, and lined their own pockets like it was going out of style, now make the citizenship pay for their errors.

Comments

[un-crayon-rouge.livejournal.com]

I will never understand elections being held on workdays. Why not on sundays, when everyone is sure to find the time to go vote? Still, 7 am to 10 pm seems a reasonable time to be able to find a polling station near you, no? And I can understand the people turning out to vote. Even if the leaders they had until now are rotten, for many it's the only way to show they care.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Party politics in Britain is a trick, and people like GK Chesterton had seen through the trick a century ago. Let us talk a little history. Historically, Parliament is the political instrument of the British upper classes - which does not mean only the aristocracy, but also the London merchants - kept the king strangled and the people oppressed. Historically, it was more oppressive and rapacious than the kings themselves; it was through its rapacity - making them his own accomplices in the spoliation of the Church and the kingdom - that the worst tyrant in English history, Henry VIII, managed to neuter Parliament and reduce it for a while to a servile and terrified tool of royal tyranny. More often, Parliament enforced its own. Its closest parallel is not with any kind of democracy, but with the closed aristocracy that ruled and owned the Republic of Venice.

Come the nineteenth century, these classes were faced with revolution. Their response was this: we shall allow the lower classes the vote - so long as they vote for us. That is the purpose of parties, even in law and political theory: they are associations for the purpose of electing definite candidates. And until the reforms of the middle and late nineteenth century, parties as such did not exist in Britain. Candidates ran with their own money and tended to associate themselves with whichever prominent politician they fancied. But when masses of new electors were let into the registers to prevent the very real danger of revolution, the party apparatuses were contrived in order to keep the votes - even the votes of the new lower-class electors - flowing to the traditional political leadership. It was a ploy that succeeded: for decades after the Reform Bill of 1867, the membership of the House of Commons remained indistinguishable from what it had been in the corrupt old days. The people who had really fought for democracy, beginning with the Chartists, were left out of the equation and forgotten. For a while, a movement arose - Labour - that really did not originate in the old political leadership, and that even managed a certain amount of radical reform; but little by little, it was normalized, the Tory Blur being the last step of its complete surrender to the old, everlasting political leadership.

That being the case, the denial of the vote to tens of thousand of citizens has a deeper significance which you do not catch, because you imagine that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland owes anything to its citizens. No: it was the real bosses, the masters, the owners of the country, who, through their low-level lackeys in local authorities, told the public: we have had enough of your votes, we don't need any more. Go home and come back when next we call you. It was the total denial of real democracy and real liberty, it was telling the people that the vote was something that their owners required of them and could take from them as they wished. And that is actually what the United Kingdom is about. The people accept it because they have no notion what real democracy is. All their lives they have been driven along certain rails, and now, although NOBODY, but NOBODY, feels represented by David Cameron (of the House of Cameron, Eton and Oxford), nonetheless they obediently trooped and gave him their assent, under the impression that they were not allowed to do anything else except vote for the even more discredited Clegg or Brown. Prties are a swindle: they are the political classes' way to occupy the political process and leave anyone else no chance to enter it. And once again, they have served their purpose.

[un-crayon-rouge.livejournal.com]

Thanks for taking the time for this long response. I didn't know many of those things about British history. So, what do you think is going to happen now? From what I'm reading in spanish newspapers, it could take days to actually form the new government. Is Cameron going to be Prime Minister?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

There will be another election. People with any civic sense would realize that this is the time for a grosse Koalition to deal with the monstrous situation of Britain (whose current national debt is larger, proportionally, than Greece's), but not this lot.

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

Here in the USA we also have a serious problem with low voter turnout. When I went to vote in the Indiana primary election that was held this past Tuesday, I was talking with one of the election judges about the contrast between countries like Iraq and Afghanistan where people walk miles and literally risk their lives to go to the polls and here, where people can't be bothered to get in their cars and haul their sorry kiesters a few blocks to vote -- to the point that we have to question whether any elected official has a genuine mandate from the people he or she represents.

Part of it may be the perception that the party system serves only the entrenched interests, such that every candidate with a real chance is in the pocket of one or another corporate power and all we can do is rubber-stamp their choices. But part of it may simply be taking certain things for granted.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I must not have been clear. There was a problem with low voter turnout last time. This time voters turned out in unprecedented numbers. So the jobsworths in the various local authorities closed the doors at ten in the evening, and when the angry electors started compaining, they called the police. This is the display of respect for the popular vote one can expect in Britain.

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

Ah, a different problem.

Unfortunately here too we have a similar problem on the few races for which we actually do get people riled enough to get good election turnout (say, if one of the candidates has done something to really torque off the citizenry, so they want to see him Gone). Here in Indiana, there's a rule that if a voter is in line but not "in the chute" (that is, past a certain arbitrary point in the line) at the time the polls close, he or she can and will be turned away. It doesn't matter how long he or she had been standing in line at the time -- if he or she hasn't reached that magic point in the line, tough (other states have similar laws, although the precise criteria differ, since the precise procedures for running the polls are determined by state election boards rather than the Federal government).

It's exacerbated by US practice that polls close at 6PM, so a lot of people come straight from work, creating a bulge of high-volume traffic right before that critical time. It's not uncommon for election judges to have a brief spurt of high-volume traffic when the polls open at 6AM as people try to get through before work, then sit idle most of the day dealing with the dribble of retirees, full-time stay-at-home parents, self-employed people and the like, then have another burst of high-volume traffic as people are getting off work. The first one isn't bad, except for the poor souls who have to leave the line because they can't get in soon enough to vote and still get to work on time, but the final burst is always rough because if it overloads the capacity of the polling system to process in a timely fashion, people who joined a little after 5 may still be stuck in line at 6 and find they've stood all that time only to be disenfranchised.

Lately there's been a move to encourage absentee voting as a way to reduce that last-minute crush. However, a lot of places may not actually count absentee votes unless a race is tight, so there's a feeling that an absentee vote doesn't really count (this really came to light in the ugliness of the 2000 Presidential election).

[cheyinka]

Yeah, when I volunteered to be a poll-watcher for the 2004 presidential election, I signed up for the first shift - so it went setup setup setup, busy busy busy busy, and then a loooooong stretch of nothing until, oh, my replacement's here already?

Ironically, I'd voted absentee at the courthouse the week before...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

In Italy, where these things are done rationally, elections are ALWAYS held on Saturdays and Sundays, the two days when most people are likely to be free to vote, And having once worked in an electoral station, I can testify that we did not close till the last voter who wished to vote had gone - bar absurdities like someone turning up at two in the morning. The whole process took twenty-four hours of work on the second day, but circumstances were exceptional - there were votes to be counted for several national referenda as well as for the general elections.

[panobjecticon.livejournal.com]

whassup? there is a large time window and many schools close for the day, making the process pretty disruptive. that there is also the possibility of postal or proxy voting ensures there's really no reason to be disenfranchised. of course, in the places where there were insufficient staff - if that was indeed the problem - someone should have gone out and told those arriving late to leave, with staff staying late to allow all others. the situation where there weren't enough ballot papers is clearly unacceptable. names and addresses should have been taken, with those votes being completed by post. it would have only taken a few extra days to administer and declare and judging by the reports, would be unlikely to have a big effect on the outcome.