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Europeans To Monitor American Voters
shonagon53 writes "The United States is known as being the world's most stable democracy. But since the Florida 2000 fiasco, things have changed.
Europe's famous Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe
(OSCE) will now be monitoring the U.S. elections. The institution normally monitors elections in third world countries in transition, and in crisis areas or regions where civil wars have destabilized the political process. In november, the OSCE will be monitoring local and state elections in Kazakhstan, Skopje, Eastern Congo, Ouagadougou and... the United States.
As
the BBC reports, for some Americans this comes as a humiliation; others see it as a necessity, since they have lost trust in the American election process."
It's always good to learn from your mistakes, but it's even better to learn from someone elses.
...if the US wants to ask third-world countries to allow their elections to be monitored, it can now say that it's happy for its own processes to be monitored.
"The United States is known as being the world's most stable democracy"
Huh? By whom? By Americans. Just like the German system is 'known' as being the most stable etc etc by Germans, the Finnish system is 'known' as being the most stable etc etc by Finns, etc.
Sorry, but I stop reading at that point. Anyone who says something like that needs to do a bit of research. Objectively, how do you mention stability? By lives lost in wars? Civil wars waged? People in prison as a percentage of the population? The relationship between percentage of votes cast and actual representation? Freedom ensconced in the constitution? Hanging or pregnant Chads? And by those citeria, are you still the most stable? And then following on, are you "known" to be the most stable? By whom? By the Chinese? By young Arabs? By the French?
I could go on but I am getting tired trying to bridge a gap of this magnitude...
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
Even the biggest, most ethical companies are audited every year*. In fact, the willingnes to submit oneself to external scrutiny sends a much more comforting signal that there is nothing to hide or be ashamed of.
Why shouldn't the same be true for elections?
* Yes, audits of public (and certain private) companies are mandatory not voluntary, but it's the principle of the matter that applies.
a world in progress...
The founding fathers were perfectly aware of the concept of the popular vote. They rejected it for excellent reasons.
If Bush wins both the popular and electoral votes in November then what will you find to complain about?
No one came over to monitor the 1880 election after the 1876 election so why are they "monitoring" the Presidental Election this time?
Because no one monitored anybody else's elections in the 19th century.
You can't take the sky from me...
Plurality voting encourages strategic (as opposed to honest) voting, and thus does a terrible job of representing the genuine desires of the electorate. A Borda/Condorcet system or approval voting system would allow people to honestly portray their preferences without ever needing to be concerned about "throwing away" their votes.
"The difference between America and England is that the English think 100 miles is a long distance and the Americans think 100 years is a long time."
No. Because there are differences in what a person who lives in California or New York wants out of a political system compared to someone who lives in Wyoming or Utah. I live in Utah, and as it is even now, the candidates very very rarely even THINK about what I would like my government to do. If you got rid of the electoral college, then I might as well live in my own country, because I'm not going to get anything that the huge masses of humanity in California don't want. And that is very likely what it would lead to. A large number of states that are ignored by one of the most powerful offices in our government because we would not affect the outcome in any election. I'm all for some type of change, but not one that will diminish the little power that I do have as a voting citizen in a small state.
Don't count your messages before they ACK.
Um... more populous states have, by definition, more people in them. Shouldn't the priority be to help the most people possible?
What do you mean "help the most people possible?" It's an election, not allocation of funding.
One needs to understand that the United States is not (at least by design, anyway) a monolithic entity, but actually a confederation of 50 sovereign nations.
When this federation was being set up, the states with the least population--and remember, these are sovereign nations--felt that a system that aportioned power based on population would see their states reduced to unimportance, with no say in interstate or foreign issues. The more populous states felt, in turn, that a system that aportioned power as a fixed percentage (i.e. "one state, one vote" as it were) left THEM, with their larger populations, with less power than they should rightfully have.
The result was the bicameral system we have today, where the legislature is divided into two houses--one with a fixed amount of votes per state, and the other with delegates aportioned by population, with each state having at least one delegate.
The electoral college is a combination of both of these ideas: each state receives a number of electors equal to their number of delegates in the house of representatives, plus the number of delegates in the senate. This ensures that pure population doesn't elect the president and create a situation where a state has no national voice.
It is in no way a perfect system, but it is a fairly good one given the issues that needed to be dealt with.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
The US Civil war ended in 1865. Canada was confederated in 1867, only two years later, and has been a completely stable democracy since this time. Many of the individual provinces were democracies prior to confederation, long before the US Civil War.
Many Americans like to think they have some sort of corner on democracy -- but they don't. The US isn't the biggest democracy (that would be India), they weren't the first democracy (the Athenians had a democracy in 6 BC), and with some of the shanannigans we've seen in previous elections, most people outside the US hadly view the US's democracy as all that "great" (don't forget that all the way into the 1960's, many southern states were still making African-Americans jump through near-impossible hoops to vote, evicted them from their land for trying, burned down places which held voting classes for African-Americans, and even murdered some black applicants).
Virtually every democracy has its dark spots -- but I (and most the rest of the democratized world) never hold up the US as being a paragon of democracy.
About the only people who consider the US to be "the worlds most stable democracy" are Americans. Most of the rest of the world would disagree with that statement. It's always a bit sad to see when some American claims this as some sort of proven fact, as it just serves to mask all the areas where the US needs to improve, and as the most economically powerful democracy, could show real leadership for the rest of the world.
Yaz.
Umm...Mods? How in any way is this interesting?
Come on Slashdot! You complain about "Faux" News being a bastion of republican influence and then promote slanderous bile like this to a +5 score--sometimes in the same thread!
Say what you will, but if there were an organized determined segment of people trying to discredit you at every chance, you'd be careful too. It's not an indication of guilt. Were there any inconsistency between their stories--no matter how minor or insignificant--people like you would be calling for impeachment.
Weren't we all? The fact is that a terrorist attack already in progress is almost impossible to stop. I'd bet you believe that John Kerry would be Man-of-Action and get fighter jets up in the air within minutes of the first plane crash--bullshit. Hindsight is 20/20. Something the democrats are going to find out is that having ONLY criticism like the above without proposing better solutions for the future doesn't help anyone.
Oh really? Find me where and when he said that. Or was that just a quote from your imagination? I guess it doesn't matter if your sources are wrong, provided you have an unwavering faith in the validity of the overall story, right?
You're making the mistake many liberals make by confusing Bush's pandering to the conservative "Bible-Belt," with his personal beliefs. In actuality, GWB--and the Bush family in general--are quite religiously moderate.
Fair enough. Nobody except your conservative counterparts are saying he was the best president ever, and even though I myself will probably vote for him in November, I will have many reservations in doing so.
-Grym
Do you count Iceland? The Althing has been around since something like 987.
Someone you trust is one of us.
> Umm - not Iceland with the rule of the Althing since about the 1100s? Not Switzerland? Granted, Iceland became a colony of Denmark, but it had a long long history of democratic rule before then. Switzerland became ruled by a duly appointed/elected junta in WWII, but there seemed to be widespread common consent to this as a matter of national survival so there seems to be the requisite continuity, accounting for wartime exigencies. It's theocratic phase, much earlier, was not country wide. If you are going to count interruptions, don't forget that the US in Reconstruction, or at and after the time of the death of Reconstruction, suffered a certain amount of democratius interruptus while sorting out whether the million pound Federal gorilla or state power was to be the predominant political influence - a struggle that was won by the million pound gorilla and has remained a stable victory to this day. All hail King Kong - his farts truly dooooo smell sweet. The essence of this thread is: Is American democracy as advertised, or does it warrant scrutiny. Plenty of the comments are on point. Narrower issues miss the point.
The difference between
But make no mistake. We won't forget this.
Please don't. And don't just remember it, learn from it too. You know, to make less mistakes in the future.
Okay, this discussion is heading for a prolonged pointless quarrel, and I couldn't ever be arsed. Fortunately those (North) Americans I have the pleasure of knowing are quite different from you. Great folks, and ones I have reason to admire. The things they have enabled me to really learn about USA have given me reason to admire the country, too. You know, always pros and cons, things to fix, where-ever you are in the world...
[By the way, Kerry is popular in Europe not directly because of his views on the world, but his affable manner. You just gotta love the big guy who doesn't show any ego problem. Compare this to slashdotters' attitude toward the IBM of the past (an evil empire of management and lawyers) and the IBM of the present (still strictly business but champions of open source): there is something of a similarity.]
so i won't attempt any alternate history. The point is that he did nothing. It seems acceptable by all that Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, said to him "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack." Opinions diverge at this point. Card later had this take on it:
Criminy! The US was under attack by persons/entities unknown and he did not bolt? The SS Red Team did not spring into action? WTF was going on here? He sat there for seven minutes completely outside communication* while this was unfolding. Appearing resolved for the cameras a few days later doesn't cut it. I can't fathom that he's been compared to Winston Churchill.**
The quote above is from this page which gives an account of Bush's actions that day. Interesting read. Is it factual? That's what we're trying to find out.
I'm not going to download the video on my dialup connection
i urge you to see the (entire) video. It's sobering.
* though supposedly, Ari Fleischer, his press secretary, wrote "DON'T SAY ANYTHING YET" and held it up for Bush to see. But that doesn't really count
** But it's funny for two reasons. Here's an interesting article about some parallels between events in America during ~1930--45 and those today.
*** the attribution to the herald-trib points to this link, which appears to no longer exist.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.