CSotD: Vox populi
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As North Africa and the Middle East surge with calls for political reform, and as the election problems in Cote d'Ivoire burst into deadly violence, French cartoonist Bernard Bouton offers this panel at Cartoon Movement, a relatively new site that gathers political cartoon commentary from a variety of global cartoonists.
International cartoons tend to be a good deal more metaphorical than narrative, and this one can be seen in at least two lights, both valid.
There is, of course, the outwardly "free election" that is a fraud, as seen in Cote d'Ivoire, where the incumbent simply refuses to accept the results, or in Iran, where the Supreme Council invalidates the candidacies of potential reform legislators (and where, even with the deck stacked, it was recently necessary to suppress the results of the elections that followed). Given the general tenor of the cartoons on this website, I suspect this is Bouton's intent.
But there is also a flawed "free election" where voters don't really understand the concept and tend to vote "Yes" out of some sense of identity rather than one of contentment. In any election, there is a certain element among the population who think the question is "Do you love your country?" or "Do you know the correct answer to this question?" rather than "Who do you want to see in power?" and who have never really contemplated the possibilities of that last question.
In a functioning democracy, they are generally a small percentage — sometimes enough to swing a close vote, but never enough to actually drive results — but in places without a tradition of democracy, and in some where a change of government is generally combined with great upheavals, they can be more of a factor. And it's too easy to dismiss them as illiterate peasants. It goes deeper than that.
A number of years ago, Canadian courts overturned a murder conviction that had been based on a confession by a MicMac who, when asked, "Did you kill so-and-so?" thought the question meant "Are you the person who was arrested in the murder of so-and-so?" and, while there may have been a language issue involved, the critical point was that he understood the question in the way it would have been asked within his community rather than the way it is asked in the larger community.
It seems to have taken deliberate isolation and certainly a lack of formal education, to be so critically unaware of how the majority culture works, but the fact remains that he didn't "get" the question.
But it's not necessarily that easy to dismiss this factor: In the early 90s, I sat in on a seminar with Soviet timber executives, highly intelligent, educated people who ran multi-million dollar companies, while they struggled to understand the concept of supply-and-demand. These articulate, well-dressed, successful professionals were genuinely flummoxed by something so basic to a free economy that Westerners assume it by the time they're in grade school. They nodded, took notes, agreed with the professor, then asked what part the central government played in setting production goals, and were totally confused and even outraged by the idea of an economic system that would allow a company to fail.
Now, the words "Free Elections" sound wonderful to anyone anywhere. "Free" always sounds good.
But I think that those of us who grow up in cultures where the term "free elections" is embedded in our DNA make a grave mistake in assuming that it is a concept everyone will understand. We also err in assuming, when the outcome of a "free election" seems clearly against the interests of the electorate, that there was deliberate fraud involved.
There often is. And there is often deliberate manipulation of voters. Certainly, there are governments who believe in the maxim, "Never ask a question to which you do not already know the answer."
But there is also a substantial number of people in the world for whom the concept has no real meaning, and we cannot assume that simply putting up ballot boxes and inviting people to fill them will resolve the issues of the world.
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