What's So Important About Elections?

Why make such a big deal about elections? Especially in these 'new', like Timor, and developing nations like Sudan, etc. ?

They spruik on and on about them as though they are the be-all and end-all of social progress.

'Free and fair democratic elections' they bang on about. All our journalists, all our politicians.

But what's the big deal? Where do they help the people?

Obvious you say. What am I on about? Am I so stupid I can't see it?

No. I'm not. My point is simple:

Usually you've got no idea whatever about the quality of the candidates.

You've got no idea what you're voting for.

That's true right here in our 'sophisticated' modern world with our two party systems. Imagine how true it is in those other places.

We should know exactly what we're going to get because we've got a long history, we've got all kinds of systems in place, we've got well organised and well known parties and really only two of them.... but we still don't know.

We vote them in but we don't get what we want and we often don't get what we've been promised.

What's the chances of 'good' candidates in stressful inaugural or struggling elections in one of those kinds of countries?

What's the chances of 'good' political parties? 'Good' bureacracies?

Those are where the real problems are. How much does an election help solve those problems?

Virtually not at all.

You'd be virtually blindly voting for a party or an individual which, after the election, may turn out to have any kind of level of honesty, ability, integrity.

What you need is all behind the scenes - honest and capable people throughout the bureacracy and the court system, whatever the proper name is for that.

Yes, true, the idea is that the right people voted into 'power' will ensure that the bureacracy and all the sytems of social organisation and government ('governance' they call it nowadays) are 'good'. Sure, that's the idea.

But the point is that the task still needs to be done. Having had an election can only make a beginning for the process. It hasn't in itself fixed anything.

And the point is that the election itself is full on confusion and nonsense - what can simple village people, peasant people, traditional subsistance farmers, know about the credentials of a politician or their party with respect to the modern world, the modern state?

How can they possibly pick the appropriate people to help them?

How can they possibly pick the right policies for their own nation, their own area, their own families and children?

They can't. They don't know what's going on.


'Free and fair' elections are simply a gimmick. A device. The rulers of the world require other rulers to talk to and that's all they want from elections. Another set of rulers to be elected and take power.

That's the level of what has been accomplished. You can say it is a necessary and a good start - to get someone in the country that you can talk to, to get a stable, settled government.

You can say that and it sounds superficially good, until you look at some of the countries that have precisely that and are still horror stories - try north Korea for instance.

Of course, the elections have virtually stopped. Free and fair elections are always stopped in places like that. But getting them back is no instant guarantee of instant fix. Is certainly no instant fix.

The basic problem is NOT 'lack of fair elections'. The basic problems are otherwise. Free and fair elections are a hope, a promise, of the finding of the right people to put in place to begin to fix the problems. Which may or may not happen.

But the world talks about the elections as though that's the whole story, the major story.

It is not, they are not, not at all.

The basic problem is identifying good people and good systems and getting them in place. Good people and good systems could have many different expression in many different places. What's good here might not be good there.

We didn't do much good in Iraq by chucking out Hussein and having elections, did we?

Or in East Timor. Or in many other places.

Because we didn't identify and think about the basic problems. We just blindly adopted this article of faith that 'free elections...' would fix everything. A ludicrously naive belief.

And a dangerous and criminal belief if you use it to avoid doing what you should do to help people - and that's just what we do.