Nation-building at home

I went to Miami to cover the elections for Inter Press Service in hopes of grabbing a front-row seat on Act 2 of the Florida Follies. Once the campaigns wound down and the voting began, though, the show ended in a whimper of anti-climax.

Yet Florida will go on evolving: just as the limestone of the peninsula rose up out of the sea only a few thousand years ago, so the electoral landmass of the state continues to swell and shift as retirees pour in from the North and immigrants from the South. The southernmost outpost of Social Security and the northernmost metropolis of Bolívar's America Grande keeps reinventing itself. We don't have to go to Iraq or Afghanistan to witness nation-building: it's happening right there in the Sunshine State.

Despite the nearly audible sigh of relief when Floridians realized they would not have to endure four more years of taunts and second-guessing, the electoral machinery there, as in much of the country, revealed some worn gears and frayed cables. The most significant shortcomings were less the technical problems than the overarching structural issues, exposed in 2000, that came into clearer focus this time through the eyes of international observers. While talking with voters, officials and monitors in the polling places, meta-questions about elections and democracy crackled over the scene like heat lightning over the Everglades.

Why do we still choose our president in the Electoral College, which violates the principle of one person, one vote, and which solved the problems of two centuries ago?

Why do we allow partisan officials such as political appointees to run elections, rather than insisting on independent, non-partisan electoral authorities insulated from political pressures, as do nearly all democratic countries?

Why do we allow a few states to haphazardly deny the vote to some former felons who have paid their debt and who pose no hazard to society in the voting booth?

Why do we not mandate high electoral standards nationally, so that a few localities cannot exclude and intimidate some voters with outmoded rules and practices.

Why do we not fund voting everywhere sufficiently so that people in poorer jurisdictions do not have to stand on line for hours just to vote?

As Óscar González, former president of the Mexican Academy of Human Rights, observed in a Mexican paper, the United States finds itself with a series of problems accumulated over 200 years of democracy, during which its electoral processes have functioned under the presupposition of fundamental honesty and good faith because they have never been subjected to critical self-examination.

Of course, these issues are not restricted to Florida; they demand a national conversation. Before the vote, ex-President and seasoned electoral observer Jimmy Carter raised a few of these points in an op-ed in the Washington Post:
Still Seeking a Fair Florida Vote, Sept. 27, 2004, http://www.cartercenter.org/viewdoc.asp?docID=1832&submenu=news
The New York Times touched on many in a post-election editorial:
New Standards for Elections, Nov. 7, 2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/opinion/07sun1.html?oref=login&n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fEditorials
International observation missions have voiced them in their reports:
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe,
http://www.osce.org/documents/odihr/2004/11/3779_en.pdf?PHPSESSID=ddd697c5fc8d5651f3ddee2fb985a4bb
Fair Election 2004, http://www.fairelection.us
Now is the moment to start resolving them, before they get swept away once again by the next partisan hurricane.

We have a very strong electoral system in many respects, and we have advised many other countries on how to build their own. Given our model status, it's a healthy exercise to cast as critical an eye on our own forms of decision-making as we do on others'.

In the next few months, for example, we'll be looking on as Iraq's embryonic political institutions undergo a stress test. In our elections, politicized Christian fundamentalists played a pivotal role, and now hope to write their version of Biblical truths into the law. In January, we'll be watching elections in Iraq in which politicized Sunni and Shi'ite fundamentalists may determine the outcome and, in the aftermath, try to impose Islamic law. Those here who anticipate an apocalyptic Rapture may encounter, if not recognize, kindred spirits there who would probably be only too happy to help usher in the Last Days. Unfortunately, the irony will be lost on all of them.

All of this underlines the caveat that elections are necessary but not sufficient for democracy. They need to be embedded in a culture of civil and human rights that protects minorities from majorities, religious and otherwise, and preserves basic freedoms, not least that of religion.

Democracy is always a work in progress. Case in point:

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Karzai's tribe says vote for him or home will be burned
September 25, 2004
The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com

Khost, Afghanistan (Agence France-Presse) -- One of the largest Pashtun tribes in southeast Afghanistan threatened two days ago to torch the homes of voters who fail to cast ballots for incumbent Hamid Karzai in next month's presidential vote.

"All Terezay tribespeople should vote for Hamid Karzai ... if any Terezay people vote for other candidates, the tribe will burn their houses," the tribe warned in a radio broadcast in the border province of Khost.

A tape of the broadcast obtained by Agence France-Presse urged both male and female members of the tribe to cast ballots in the election and to support Mr. Karzai, a fellow Pashtun.

"All Terezay tribespeople, including males and females, have to vote for Hamid Karzai because he is the only suitable person for the presidential post," it said.

The Terezays number between 120,000 and 150,000 and are scattered in the mountains of southern and eastern Afghanistan. Pashtuns make up the largest of Afghanistan's ethnic groups.
Mr. Karzai, the favorite to win the Oct. 9 election, must win support from the same communities the Taliban militants come from.

The English-speaking transitional leader faces 17 rival candidates, among them former Education Minister Yunus Qanooni, an ethnic Tajik who gets wide support in the north.

Taliban-led insurgents, from the regime that was ousted in the 2001 U.S.-led military after sheltering al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, have threatened to disrupt voting and attack all 18 candidates.
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Chuckle if you will, but you could find similar, if less earnest, forms of pressure not long ago in Mayor Daley's Chicago and in parts of my home state of New Jersey. As the saying went among the tribes of Cook County and Hoboken, "Vote early and vote often."

We end this entry with a partisan joke told by Garrison Keillor on his radio show, A Prairie Home Companion:

What's the difference between Vietnam and Iraq?
George W. Bush had an exit strategy for Vietnam.