Election Methodologies Discussion WARNING: HERE BE DRAGONS!!!

[Karro]

If I can allow me to put the focus back to the primary subject (which was, I think, electoral system)...

I'd like to give you a hint of how things are done in my small country...

In Belgium, voting is not a right, it's a duty. Every person over 18 y.o. has to go voting, not to vote being a crime. Each voter gets a summoning around 1 month before the election day telling you where you have to vote. On the D-Day (which is ALWAYS a sunday, so that fewer people are working) you go to the voting place (primary schools - always), give your ID to the official (BTW what's that about picture ID and non-picture ID - we all have the same ID, here) who marks your name in the list, then you receive your ballot paper - which is free from all personal marks - and vote.

Any ballot paper bearing personal marks such as name, adress,... is disqualified and counts as a blank vote (you have to go voting but can decide to vote for no one, here).

Political system here is fully representative (there is no "winner takes all", representation is proportional). We have 4 major parties (socialist -means left wing but not communist-, liberal -means right wing, not progressist-, ecologist and catholic -called humanist now, cause they want to free from religious references) and a lot of others who don't get more than 2% of the votes. Parties must then negociate and form coalitions to have a majority.

I'll pass on language-related issues, our country having three official languages (french, dutch and german), but the northern part (dutch speaking) and the southern part (french and german-speaking) have different parties - 4 to the south and 5 to the north (they have a major extreme-right party there).

The system is far from perfect, but it kinda works...

We are coming back from electronic voting. We bought it cause politicians told us it was safer, cheaper and faster than paper votes. It comes now that there are more frauds and errors, it is 4 times more expensive and we only gain two hours for the results. I prefer the good old paper ballot, seems more democratic to me (there are a chosen number of independent citizens and parties witnesses to do the counting, and democratic control is purely impossible with the computer assisted method).

Well, I think it is almost all. I thought it could be interesting to have the point of view from a European citizen on how things work here. It's fairly different because of two major differences : 1 We have a much much much smaller country, with as many inhabitants as in NY. 2 We don't have the same political culture.

I hope it interested you (anyway you didn't have to read it if it didn't ;-) ) and it was understandable (my english isn't as good as I would want it to be - especially for such technical matters)...

If you have any question don't hesitate - I love talking about politics...

Making it illegal not to vote would never fly here in the U.S. Regardless of whether you had to choose a specific candidate or not, requiring people to vote would be considered as much of a strike against civil liberties as refusing a legitimate voter the opportunity to vote--maybe even more so (vis-a-vis the attempts by one party or another to try to suppress the get-out-the-vote efforts of the other party or to challenge new registrations, etc.)

It is interesting to learn about how other countries do it.

[Korrigan]

Making it illegal not to vote would never fly here in the U.S. Regardless of whether you had to choose a specific candidate or not, requiring people to vote would be considered as much of a strike against civil liberties as refusing a legitimate voter the opportunity to vote--maybe even more so (vis-a-vis the attempts by one party or another to try to suppress the get-out-the-vote efforts of the other party or to challenge new registrations, etc.)

It is interesting to learn about how other countries do it.

It is a law that was put up when the votes were censal here in belgium (back in the mid-19th century) and when it was necessary that everybody who had the right to vote did so.

The law has never been changed since but somehow I think it isn't worse... Problems of citizens not enough involved seems to be quite the same where voting isn't an obligation...

Anyway, the controls are seldom and you don't risk a lot if you fail to vote once... but if you are caught failing a few times, you can say goodbye to some of your civil rights (voting, being elected, and a few others I never remember - I never had to know, I was into politics even before I could vote )... and of course you'll have to pay a fine...

[Redrobes]

Thats interesting Korrigan. I dont want to too much extended life to this thread but ill say how ours works just for interest. There may be some errors in it but its basically about it.

We don't have to vote but about half the population do on the general election which is every 5 years or so. The country is divided up into regions called constituencies which is represented by a Minister of Parliament or MP. Each constituency is supposed to contain about the same number of people but is adjusted for geography too. When you vote you vote for which MP you want in your area not for the total government party. The MP is usually affiliated with one of the main parties but can also be an independent. When the MP is affiliated with a party he/she is supposed to generally go with the party policies but can vote against the party in which case he is known to rebel on certain issues. I.e. its important to know what your MP thinks as well as the party line. Only one MP is elected per region so all the losing MP's votes in a region are discarded. I.e. we don't have proportional representation and is kinda similar to the US representatives.

The Houses of Parliament (the building you see on the TV with Big Ben clock) is made up of all the MP's and votes on law are made with them each having a vote. There are usually two main parties of the left and right (although both are very center nowadays) so if the number of MP's in the house is nearly even then the effect of the smaller parties is more exaggerated because their alliance with one or the other makes a big difference - i.e. lots of back room deals and corruption fosters. If one party has an even modest majority then there is almost nothing anyone else can do - i.e. abuse of power with little moderation.

Once bills are voted into law they then go on to the House of Lords where it all gets kind of messy. The Lords are a group of unelected people of significance and often large land owners and also often of historical significance. I am not sure how you can become one but the old prime minister Margret Thatcher gave herself an hereditary peerage which meant she became one and also that all her children and grandchildren will take on the title. She is now Baroness Thatcher because of it. Some of the Lords take their place in the House of Lords and some others do not and a few choose to go and yet say nothing. Its odd. Anyway, their job is to look at the proposed new law and decide if it is enforceable within the justice system. They often throw laws which have just been passed out or bounce them back to parliament for amending. Parliament can override this in a similar way that the US president has presidential veto. Once a bill passes the Lords then its signed by the Queen and is then active. She otherwise has very little formal activity in the process of government though the prime minister consults with her each week so I guess her ideas do get in there somehow.

Well that's our system and I think by the state of my country it shows that it doesn't work. The system leads to short term thinking where getting into government for the next cycle is more important than the process of government itself. Governments of all parties and over many years have sold off the profitable, valuable and working bits of the country's infrastructure to give them the money to stay in power rather than leave it to the next party but all have had to take on the necessary unworkable rest of system. But they have hardly anything left of worth to sell now so its all falling apart.

The problem is that the vast majority of people don't vote for the ones which will make things right for the country - only what will immediately benefit their own circumstances in isolation. We also have very similar policies by all parties and that because minority parties votes are discarded then if you vote for anyone but the bigger ones you might as well not vote at all. This leads to many people thinking that its pointless voting generally and the cycle continues. Also, the two big parties don't want to change that system and the smaller parties do, so the system will not change unless there is mass civil unrest which is very un-British.

Im not going to dwell on actual parties except one. Our longest serving electable MP who never actually won any of his elections and who has unfortunately died is a chap known as Screaming Lord Such of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party.

That scene in Monty Python was directly parodying him and Lord such then had an MP elect in one of the constiuencies named after the sketch as:

Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim-bus-stop-F'tang-F'tang-Olé-Biscuitbarrel

But best of all, his party actually won a council seat in a by election. And some of their extraordinary election manifesto ideas have actually become law - like the passports for pets which you can actually get in the UK now.

You don't see so much of them any more since the death of Such which I think is a tremendous pity.

[Korrigan]

I didn't know your famous english sense of humor which I am fond of had room in politics too

Actually, different systems interest me a lot for the world I'm building... One of the countries in it discovered democracy recently and I realize that the system I created looks a lot like yours !

But considering what you were saying about short-time view in politics, we have pretty much the same problem here. Federal elections are every 4 years, regional elections every 5 and local elections every 6... Make the count and you'll see that we vote close from every year... Which greatly limits political courage at every level of power... But I have no miracle solution to counter that, especially since I see other democratic systems face the same problems...

I'd be curious to discover how things work in Australia or South-Africa...

[Karro]

I didn't know your famous english sense of humor which I am fond of had room in politics too

Actually, different systems interest me a lot for the world I'm building... One of the countries in it discovered democracy recently and I realize that the system I created looks a lot like yours !

But considering what you were saying about short-time view in politics, we have pretty much the same problem here. Federal elections are every 4 years, regional elections every 5 and local elections every 6... Make the count and you'll see that we vote close from every year... Which greatly limits political courage at every level of power... But I have no miracle solution to counter that, especially since I see other democratic systems face the same problems...

I'd be curious to discover how things work in Australia or South-Africa...

I think the time horizon is an ever-present problem of representative democracies. If the time between elections is too short, the representatives are given to focusing exclusively on the next election cycle. They are constantly in election-campaign mode, and never focused on actually getting anything done. Too long, and the representative stays in power so long that they stop caring what the constituent public thinks or cares about, and becomes influencable primarily by financially powerful special interests. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an equilibrium point between the two extremes, as somewhere around the middle, the two problems start to overlap a little, and then you have to deal with corruption from two directions at once! It takes some serious moral integrity to overcome these twin pitfalls...