Disclaimer: this is meant as an outsider's POV, not to be inflammatory and
not to be insulting. I am probably as much or more critical of Canadian
politics, but this is an American-centric list, so I am doing the
chameoleon thing. If it's any consolation, this argument is probably just
as applicable Canada's system, and also I think it's a bit technophilic,
considering Brett's comments about the Australian system. I don't think
that a technological solution is NECESSARILY the only answer to the
question I raise, but I think it's a pretty striking possibility in a
culture where technologization is tantamount to improvement and recognition
of importance.
In any case . . . I offer this as a different perspective.
At 8:03 AM -0400 12/11/2000, J. van Baardwijk wrote:
>I know of a relatively small country in Europe, called The Netherlands. In
>that country, voting has been done electronically for about ten years now
>-- at all elections: local, provincial and national. It is working great:
>it's impossible to vote for more than one candidate, human error in
>counting is impossible, and results can be tallied immediately. When the
>polling stations close (typically at 8 pm), the final results for each
>station are sent in electronically. It does of course take some time to get
>the results of all those stations added, but the final results are usually
>known shortly after midnight.
>
>If the Dutch can do it, why can't the Americans do it with all their
>advanced technology?
This leads to another striking point that I have been pondering, Jeroen. I
think it's illustrative of the fact that values is a problem. Let me get at
it this way: I heard a joke once about a Lebanese fellow coming to Montreal
because he'd heard that Montreal had English politics, French culture, and
American technology. Arriving, he was disappointed to find that Montreal
had French politics, American culture, and English technology.
Well, if American technology is so advanced, where is it? It looks to me
like you may have American technology all over the place, but it also seems
to me it's all concentrated in the areas where it will make money; thus you
are voting with "English" technology, or worse. This shows how, as Benjamin
Barber argued, democrats may prefer capitalism, but capitalism does not
necessarily prefer democracy. But if you do truly value democracy, then it
has to be something that counts and matters more than the almighty dollar,
enough to invest in it and make a big deal about democracy's functionality
and health.
If you're not willing to do that with the one little bit of representative
process in your government that you actually have, I have trouble believing
America is the bastion of democracy that I keep hearing Americans say it
is. I see instead the signs of that political system being in decline,
being unnecessary to the really central values of your country and to our
shared culture -- essentially, a culture of consumers first and citizens
maybe. In our shared culture, your countries claims of being so
"democratic" take on at least the weight of your own convictions,
regardless of how critical I am of that as an outsider. But in the face of
what I see before me, how can I believe in "democracy" even in this
minimalised form that you have, when the one venue of participation that is
instituted and offered by the government is not even taken seriously enough
to invest money in updating and improving it nationwide? This, in a country
that openly considers itself the most advanced nation in the world, and
certainly one that has more than its fair share of the world's resources at
its disposal, along with the lion's share in technological advances.
I guess the question is, "We can be advanced in any number of ways. Do we
want to be 'advanced' in that particular way?" Looking at a book like David
Brin's _The Transparent Society_, one might be tempted to imagine a kind of
hidden and discoverable force driving us toward potentially improved
democracy through the relentless advances in technology. Yet the fact of
the matter is, technological advance is not some natural process, it is
directed by wide-scale value systems (the aesthetics of the culture that is
producing the tech) and by needs and demands. Technology is at once a
choice that we make, AND simply an externalization of our value-systems as
they are at the present. This is obviously true because we may not like to
think it, but our value systems are the product of our own choice, and the
technologies that coalesce around these values are only expressions of our
choices as a society. For example, this is why cars are so central to
American life -- aesthetics that link it to freedom, but also because of
wider aesthetic value-sets that prioritize suburban life as a solution for
the problems of the big city -- but all of these solutions not being
absolute ones, or exclusively valid ones: each of these solutions being one
of many possible solutions, note.
But in the thick of this technological-development process, the only
demands that seem to be registering are on the level of your importance as
consumers. As citizens, you apparently have made no demands (at least not
until recently) for improvement -- here (although it is problematic to do
so) synonymized with technological advance in the very means of the
representation of your voices. If you did, you would be using far more
efficient systems -- and here I am not even arguing for proportional
representation, I am arguing for the basic mechanics of collecting the
votes themselves to be processed in whatever manner you agree on as a
society.
I would wager that most of you have not in months had more than 10% of your
purchases recorded by a machine older than 10 years old. And yet your
voting system takes advantage of none of this "technological advancement."
This is important not only because of how it makes America look in the
public eye -- for example, one friend of mine mentioned how she got a
forward from Kenya about how they could have done up a sham election quite
well for you if you'd asked nicely; but it is also important because it
shows in some small way one of the central dilemmas that you face and that
most of the West faces with you: that democracy is not necessary to
capitalism, perhaps not even useful to it in the end, and that in some
cases democracy is anticonducive to a capitalism which values stability of
markets and the status quo more than human freedom.
Kierkegaard humorously wrote as Vilhelm (in _Either/Or_), "Aren't people
absurd! They never use the freedom they do have but demand those they don't
have; they have the freedom of thought, they demand the freedom of speech"
(43). Obviously, I take issue with Vilhelm, and think that freedom of
speech and freedom of thought are co-dependent -- though I agree with his
frustration. But I think similarly that freedom of choice and democracy are
codependent -- and yet freedom of choice is exactly what is undermined in a
faulty voting mechanism. It is problematic, calling freedom of choice
freedom at all: in the choice between Captain Crunch and Tony the Tiger, or
between RCA and Sony VCRs on which to watch films with either Tom Cruise or
Sharon Stone in them while eating microwave popcorn bought either in
Loblaws or IGA (my choice) and afterward brushing with Colgate or Crest
[1], I would wish to say, "I choose democracy," or "I choose to support the
freedom to choose for the Burmese," or "I choose to side with the UN on
this mandate about the rights of children, and to take steps to actually
enforce it in my own country as well as worldwide." But where can we say
this? Our choices are not real choices. They are the appearance of choice
filling the space where choice could exist but doesn't. Your voting halls
should be like temples, but instead it is your shopping malls that are like
temples. Aren't people absurd, they demand on the freedom of choice, but
they do not demand that their choice matter: they demand the vote as a
sacred rite, but they do not demand that their vote be tallied and handled
in a way that befits a sacred right. [2]
Fine, we seem as a culture to have accepted this kind of bartering away of
real participation in our own "democratic" systems, and I doubt I can do
much to convince us that this is a mistake. [After all, we are too busy
working to make money to buy things, far too busy to get mad about it much
or for very long anyway. *grumble*] That's not to claim that democracy and
capitalism NEED to be incompatible, it's to say that you should not expect
democracy from capitalism, any more than you should expect revolution from
academia. When the smallest remaining vestiges of participation are even
debased not so much by outright sabotage, but by the institutionalized
disrespect of neglect, or inattention, of deprioritization -- because
democracy is not profitable enough to warrant its upkeep -- then there are
some extremely serious problems that need to be addressed. Not just because
of the recent events: those just brought the issue to my attention. The
current mess seems to me to be mere injury added to insult. The insult [to
your own professed ideals] is that you don't have new, shiny, highly
functional technological solutions in place for this element of
participation in your government; in truth, for the health of your nation,
that system which records your one vote every four years ought to matter
much more to you than the tech that tracks purchases and profits at your
average grocery store chain outlet; that is the apparent message, and the
only message I can take from the situation as it stands. And again, please
remember that I am not saying the technology is the problem: I am saying
that its status reflects a bigger problem, and one I'm very willing to
concede is shared by Canada generally.
It would perhaps have been better to have the realization without the mess,
to show even further the kind of neglect of that one small venue of
democracy in American life. As it is, where the parties compete over
winning as they seem to be doing, with the law being more like a set of
rules to a game, I think it's fair to say that ethics and values have gone
out the window completely. And you're looking at me as if to say, "Well,
yeah, duh!" But I don't think this is something that should be accepted
sitting down. I don't think it should be so easily In any case, I mean
neither to castigate nor to mock, and I mean not to discuss the importance
of the current mess -- I think it's a tiny historical footnote, most
likely -- but when I think about the technology involved in it, and
consider that technology really is a powerful symbol of the value system of
the culture that produces it, I can't help but quote Allen Ginsberg's
famous poem, "America", where he says, "America, this is serious."
Gord
[1] And perhaps even using a toothbrush with more efficiency-assuring
technological sophistication than the system used to tally votes, a
toothbrush with an on-off switch and bristle-patterns designs recently
improved by an engineer in 1999.
[2] Rite, as in ritual, being in some cases cathartic or reassuring even
when the performant is assured of his or her act's ineffectuality. This
probably reflects the apathetic attitudes of even many participating voters
I know, who feel that they are voting "despite" rather than "because".
