One of the more interesting things about being in the U.S. at this time is the upcoming election day.
No democratic system is perfect. If there was one, the politicians would ensure that it didn’t work. Australia, my birthplace, has a weird Westminster system that was inherited from the British where you vote for regional representatives of a particular party and the head of the party with the most representatives becomes Prime Minister. Trouble is, the PM is answerable to the parliamentary caucus, so they can get rid of him mid-term. This is not theoretical. In Australia, the ruling party seems to change its leader as frequently as cheap hotels change clientele. (And maybe for similar reasons).
Israel has a system that is so democratic that it is undemocratic. Once you reach the 3.5% threshold, a party gets the amount of seats in the Knesset as it does proportion of the vote. This is true democracy, in theory. In practice, no-one gets a majority and governments are set up by cobbling together a coalition of parties, often held ransom by small parties that hold the balance of power and therefor whose influence is greater than their parliamentary numbers.
And then you have the weirdest system of them all. The American system.
This year, the 3rd of November is election day, right? Wrong. Essentially, the election season finishes on the 3rd November and vote counting starts. Each state has its own rules, but given the complexities of voting during the Covid19 pandemic, we may not know the results for maybe a month after voting ends. So the concept of election day is a bit of a misnomer, since, so far, 52 million Americans have already voted and in the 2 weeks to go, who knows how many will have voted. 52 million is a third of the total number of votes cast in the 2016 elections. Susan and I were sitting on a bench in Northampton Massachusetts yesterday, that happened to be next to a voting box. In the 15 minutes we sat there, at least 20 citizens came to place their votes in the box. In Boston, in order to encourage citizens to come out and vote early, they placed ballot boxes in the most hallowed place in the city. No. Definitely not Parliament House. Fenwick baseball park. And it worked. There was an article on the Boston television news where people admitted that the Fenwick bait is what got them out to vote. And Massachusetts is one of the more normal states in the USA!! It’s realistic to imagine that well less than half of all votes will actually be cast on election day.
There is a variety of terms that refer to anyone who doesn’t stand in line for 4 hours on 3rd November. I’m not sure that I understand the difference between absentee, mail-in, and early voting, but I think that if you stand in line today, 23rd October, for 4 hours rather than on the 3rd November, that’s an absentee vote. I think these are the ones that Trump likes. Alternately, you can just send your vote in by mail. I think these are the ones that Trump says are open to fraud. I actually understand him. Given that he has done the absolute maximum, and then some, to cripple the mail system, could it be that he has devised a way for these votes not to be post marked and not counted by 3rd November? True fraud.
I’m sort of used to being able to vote in an election because I’m a citizen and have the right to vote. There seems in America, however, to be a number of very creative ways to prevent citizens from voting. In Florida, a referendum gave ex felons the right to vote. Very nice of them to allow people who have paid their debt to society their democratic rights. However, the governor wasn’t so sure that he liked a large number of coloured and mostly Democrat voters being re-admitted to the voting roll, so he insisted that a felon can only get his democratic rights back if he has paid all his financial debts, including court costs and fines to the state. In a classic Catch-22 situation, there is no registry that tells you how much you owe and to which county (sometimes there are multiple debts in multiple counties), so the ex-felon can’t actually find out who he owes money to and thus, can’t be re-enrolled to vote. Genius.
Other states engage in electoral roll purges. I’m not absolutely certain what that is, but it sounds ominous. Maybe they just wipe the names of people named Briana, Aaliyah, DeShawn or Darnell from the roll, without telling them. Or maybe they have to pay to be on the roll? Whoops. That’s a poll tax. That’s illegal, isn’t it? I wonder if Brian and Karen have such troubles?
And yet, it still is the largest democracy in the world, and I admire the general adherence and even adoration to democratic ideals, even if the candidate who receives the most votes may not necessarily win the presidency. Ask Hilary. So even if the result takes a while, and there are imaginative ways to try to subvert the result, I guess it’s preferable to let’s say, Russia, which has half the population but the election result is front page news the day before the elections.
It’s a strange, unreliable creature, this democracy thing. But I guess it’s better than the alternatives.