Interesting Stuff About Elections

Most of us in western countries were taught that the political process we now call democracy, at least the election part of it, began in Ancient Greece. Indeed, Greece did have a workable democratic system where each citizen had a right to be heard on any subject of interest to the community. However the system broke down when too many wanted to be heard. In fact, the Greeks didn't have the first form of democratic election.

It shouldn't be surprising that in the Middle East, the likely birthplace of agriculture and the first known large civilizations, the people of Ebla (in modern day Syria) elected their kings for seven year terms. That was two thousand years before the Greeks got their system started.

We humans aren't the only species on the planet to vote. Even though honeybees can't count, they have an elective system for deciding where to locate a new hive. When the time to build a new hive arrives, scouts go out in all directions searching for the best spots. When they return, each has a location in mind. They decide the best one by dancing. The more vigorously a scout dances, the more she is able to persuade other scouts to join her. When the marathon dancefest is over, the scout bee that recruited the most other scouts to her choice wins and the other bees agree to make it unanimous.

At least they make the decision unanimous most of the time. When two or more queens are competing for supremacy of a hive and one can't manage to kill the other(s), the hive can split and re-establish themselves as two independent hives. The losing queens are killed. Always.

Polling before human elections has been going on for a long time. In the United States, the Harrisburg Pennsylvanian conducted a poll before the 1824 presidential election. The poll predicted that Andrew Jackson would tally the most votes. And he did.

Unfortunately, the US has this strange beast called the electoral college. Each state has a way to determine how its share of members sent to the electoral college after an election will vote. The vote of the electoral college--technically not the citizens who voted in their local communities--determines who will become the president of the United States.

The electoral college vote in the House of Representatives in 1824 gave the nod to John Quincy Adams, who immediately become the president.

The first televised election in which a computer played a major role in the US was in 1952. CBS viewers saw Walter Cronkite sitting beside UNIVAC 1, which made the remarkable prediction that Eisenhower would win after only seven percent of the votes had been counted and registered.

However, what the CBS viewers actually saw was no more a working computer than those of Star Trek or other sci-fi movies. Mr. Cronkite sat beside a cardboard panel filled with massive numbers of Christmas light bulbs that flashed on and off intermittently. The real UNIVAC 1 that did the work of tallying counted votes was in Pennsylvania.

Back in 2007, neuroscientists thought they likely had the best way to determine (well ahead of the 2008 election) which candidates were most likely to have their names on the ballot. They connected to the brains of a large number of undecided voters (in a lab setting) and showed each pictures of the leading candidates for each party.

The results of the survey? The candidates that elicited the least amount of brain activity were John McCain and Barack Obama. While most of us would see that as being funny or strange, sociologists will do similar tests in future elections to determine if low brain activity when viewing a picture of a candidate might be a factor to determine how undecided voters will vote in the election.

In a few countries, citizens are required to vote, by law. Failing to vote is a serious offence and if you didn't vote you had better have a dandy excuse when the authorities come calling after an election. Belgium has a system for compulsory voting. If you miss voting in four elections over a period of 15 years, you are automatically penalized. The penalty? Offenders are not permitted to vote for the next ten years. (Okay, the system's not perfect.)

The penalty for violating Belgium's compulsory voting law--and for those of us who are not US citizens, the hanging chad problem whose resolution elected a president whose primary functions seemed to be to start wars and ruin economies--seem confusing. But they don't hold a candle (for confusion) to the way the Venetians used to elect their chief magistrate or Duke, called the Doge. For over five centuries (some sources say closer to 1000 years), Venice elected its Doge using the following process. (Warning: This is even more confusing than most stuff to do with elections.)

Thirty members of the Great Council were chosen by lot. Another lot reduced this number to nine. Those nine then chose 40 others for the next stage. Another lot reduced the 40 to 11. (Still with me?)

The 11 then chose a group of 41 who actually elected the Doge.

Historians assure us that the Venetian system worked well to avoid corruption and impact by special interest groups, though the final man selected was inevitably from the aristocracy. The Doge held office for life and lived and worked in a palace beside the Grand Canal, with St. Mark's Basilica on the other side.

The lever voting machine came into use in the United States in 1892, in Lockport, New York. Its inventor, Jacob H. Myers, intended to "make the process of casting the ballot perfectly plain, simple and secret. Its patent shows that at the time it first came into use the lever voting machine had more moving parts than any other machine in the country.

Moving forward to 2007, the Swiss used some sophisticated new technology to ensure security for their election. It involved the use of quantum physics. Voting was done electronically, of course, with the keys for returns being transmitted using polarized photons.

Back in the United States, the Department of Defense, for the election in 2006, used a web-based voting system for their military personal stationed out of the country and for US expatriates. The system cost over $830,000. Some 63 people used it to vote.

A little sociological voting trivia. Candidates whose names appear on the ballot close to the names of the most popular candidates apparently receive more votes than the polls beforehand suggested they should. Candidates whose names are first on the ballot list tend to get more than their expected share of votes. Australia has compulsory voting and those whose names appear first on the ballots tend to receive one percent of the total votes cast, even if the person is a relative unknown.

Rain changes voting patterns. In the US, for every inch of rain that falls on election day in a given county, the voter turnout dropped by 0.8 percent, in a study.

Think that rain shouldn't affect an election much? Computer models have shown that if it had rained in Illinois on election day in 1960, Richard Nixon would have defeated John F. Kennedy.
If it had been a sunny day in Florida for the 2000 election, Al Gore would have clearly got more votes than George W. Bush, which would have made Gore the president. With or without the notorious hanging chads.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who are balanced developmentally in all respects, not just intellectually and physically.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

We All Help Banks Make Fortunes

I place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
- Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)

Why does a government incur huge public debt? When several successive sets of elected representatives choose to keep taxes low instead of investing in infrastructure such as roads, sewers and water purification, one set eventually must bear the burden of raising enormous amounts of money to bring these up to standard before disaster strikes. That is always done by borrowing.

War require large debts to be accumulated, especially in modern times when weaponry and stealth investigation have reached such sophistication that both winners and losers of war take decades to recover financially. Banks rack up unbelievable profits while the public foots every bill, both principal and interest.

Occupying another country is so costly that it cripples the occupying country while inflicting limited damage on the country being occupied. The Society Union finally collapsed from the weight of its own debt when it could no longer sustain the fortunes it was paying to neighbours that were pro-USSR. Occupying Afghanistan proved the undoing of the old union because the Afghans refused to submit and continued to fight indefinitely.

The continually rising tax burden relating to hiring more police and judges, building more courts and prisons and incarcerating previously inconceivable numbers of offenders hobbles honest citizens who know little about how this could be largely avoided by changing the education system to provide what children need instead of what industry wants.

Jefferson's warning means little today. We tend to elect representatives who will spend the most, who borrow the most, but who promise to reduce taxes at election time. Most of us content ourselves with the excuses our governments offer us for why they couldn't reduce taxes and why their enormous borrowings were needed. Until the next election when they once again promise to reduce our taxes and we believe them again.

Yet can we blame our governments for accumulating huge public debt that must be paid from taxes when our amount of personal debt (through credit) has reached unprecedented levels? Many of us pay twice the cost of a home or vehicle because we must pay so much interest on our debt. Today's fifty year mortgages, for example, mean that the borrower will be in debt for a lifetime.

Forced saving through debt payment costs much more than voluntary payment by personal savings and investments. It's a simple lesson that the lending institutions don't want us to learn.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make the most important lessons easy to understand.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Do We Really Get The Government We Deserve?

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
- George Bernard Shaw

Shaw was a negative person much of the time and his sarcasm shines brightly with this quote.
What he is saying is that if voters are ignorant of the issues, if a majority of them don't vote and if the ones who do vote do so based on advertising parties have paid hugely for an advertising agency to create, then we shouldn't be surprised at the results of the people who get elected.

Who is to blame? Eligible voters who don't find out about the issues? In the highly charged political atmosphere that exists in many countries today, it may be nearly impossible to get a balanced set of information on any given issue from most media.

The ones who don't vote? These people may not be apathetic so much as they don't want to vote for one lackey over another. "They're all the same," many claim. These people don't want to admit that they are totally ignorant about the issues of the election.

People who vote for the most popular candidate? These people are sincere enough to want to do their civic duty. They simply don't have enough information at their disposal on which to make informed choices.

Despite appearances to the contrary, it is likely that most people want to vote, want to make an informed choice and want to know that the candidate of their choice knows about the issues that interest them. The problem is that no official mechanisms are in place to inform citizens in an unbiased manner about legislation that will affect their lives.

The media have staked out their territory, with the heavily biased ones prepared to inundate citizens with the highly editorialized versions of the party policies of their choice, while the others stay away from politics as much as possible.

We need some of the non-committed local newspapers or radio stations to devote some of their space or time to giving people the information they need.

As it is now, most people have access only to heavily biased outlets or others that do not cover political news.

It sounds ironic, but some of the media need to start delivering the facts. We need to ask them to do it.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to throw a rope of hope to desperate voters.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Power Politics Attracts The Corruptible

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.
- David Brin, American author (1950- )

This quote struck me with such effect that it was like a bolt of lightning out of a blue sky. It explained for me something that has caused me considerable doubt and pondering for years.
Why do supposedly good politicians go bad? Brin says that it's the corruptibility of those who crave power in the first place that sets up the potential.

That's not to say that all politicians are corrupt or corruptible. But then, not all politicians seek the kind of power that puts them in the position of being able to indulge in corruption.

Politics has a long history of corrupt representatives, ever since the early days of democracy in ancient Greece after the "every man has a vote on every issue" period changed to the first kind of representative democracy and some senators could be bribed to vote as they payers wished.

For much of the last century politics in the great democracies was dominated by lawyers. Knowing the reputation of lawyers today, little more needs to be said to explain the outrageous corruption that prevailed in many places.

Democratic countries today are turning more to top level business people and academics. The advantage of academics is that they know how to think matters through and their original choice of profession would not have been influenced by a basic desire for wealth.

Business people, however, do not necessarily share the same fundamental moral code as academics. Even the lawyers have had to clean up their act a great deal to prevent the reputation of their profession from being further sullied.

While business people in government demonstrate the need for greed and power to some extent, as they have been accustomed to in business, lawyers in the same government are more apt to be in politics because of the recognition they receive, such as in the media. Fame take precedence over power as the driving force of many lawyers in government.

In Canada, national representatives who have served a minimum of six years in office receive a sizable pension for life once they are no longer in office. They don't enjoy great wealth when they are still in parliament, but they enjoy many options once they leave because they can depend on a secure income.

The problem of nominating the best people still exists. In pre-election nomination meetings, influence, prior service to the community and simple popularity tend to carry the day. The major criterion on the minds of most voting members is "Which one can win?"

Only when the main criterion is "Which candidate can best represent the interests of our community and our party?" will we have fewer corruptible representatives in government.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make the complex issues of life a little easier to manage.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Not Thinking Enough Causes Us Grief

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
- Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)

We have no trouble with people not digesting enough. Obesity is shockingly in evidence in almost every country, with developed countries at or near critical levels.

We do, however, have a problem with reading. The Canadian government recently released a study showing that only six percent of Canadian adults reads more than three books per year. (Canadians and Americans usually score similarly on such surveys.) When you consider that many people must read a variety of books just to remain up to date with their profession, their interests or even their love of recipes, that percentage is extremely low.

People do read, of necessity. Television news programs often force viewers to read what the presenter does not speak, but is offered as extra material. Medical prescriptions come with data sheets that should be read to ensure that the patient can regain health (not lose it) as a result of taking the medication.

New electrical or electronic equipment always comes with installation and safety warnings which should be read. Ingredient labels on packaged foods allow us to know what nutrients we buy and ingest so we know whether to avoid them or not.

The prime motivator for people to read today is the internet. Fully half of North Americans use the internet as their primary source of news and an even greater percentage use it a their major source for other information.

Like it or not, we read. Whether we reflect is another matter.

Low voter turnouts for elections in western countries show that few people care enough about the results to read about the candidates before an election. Dissatisfaction with those elected suggests that those who voted may not have read enough about the people they voted for.

Perhaps one of the reasons why religious institutions in western countries are losing more members than they gain is the fact that attending most services requires reading of several passages from books. We may believe in God, for example, but we couldn't tell anyone what the religion we were raised in teaches about the subject today because that would require reading and thought.

What Burke meant by "reflecting" we might consider as thinking about what we have learned. Judging by how easily people are deceived by advertisers, charlatans, politicians, service businesses and anyone who claims to speak on behalf of God, we don't think nearly enough about matters that affect our lives deeply.

We even ignore health warnings about materials such as tobacco that we are told will likely shorten our lives. We hear people say "I'm not sick now, so I guess it won't affect me." Then they die years before they would have otherwise.

It would serve us well to think more about what is important about life and spend less time thinking how to spend our money.

On the final day of our life, what will be important is not how we spent our money but how we used the time allotted to us. On that day, if not before, money no longer holds any importance.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to show the differences.
Learn more at http://billallin.com