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

[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.