It is Election Day. Whatever your political persuasion, it is an important day for democracy. Apathy among voters is common unless the result directly affects their lives. But I think it’s a sacred responsibility that not many countries get to enjoy. So, I try to be an informed voter. I read an objective newspaper and listen to or watch a news channel that presents both sides. I log onto the League of Women’s Voter website which has a very objective Voter’s Guide including political races at lower levels. It asks candidates in the same race the same questions and prints their answers. I base my vote on what their answers are and how they fit with my political views.
According to Wikipedia, an election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual or multiple individuals to hold public office.
Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy has operated since the 17th century. Elections may fill offices in the legislature, sometimes in the executive and judiciary, and for regional and local government. This process is also used in many other private and business organizations, from clubs to voluntary associations and corporations.
The universal use of elections as a tool for selecting representatives in modern representative democracies is in contrast with the practice in the democratic archetype, ancient Athens, where the elections were considered an oligarchic institution and most political offices were filled using sortition, also known as allotment, by which officeholders were chosen by lot.
Electoral reform describes the process of introducing fair electoral systems where they are not in place, or improving the fairness or effectiveness of existing systems. Psephology is the study of results and other statistics relating to elections — especially with a view to predicting future results. Election is the fact of electing or being elected.
To elect means "to select or make a decision," and so sometimes other forms of ballot such as referendums are referred to as elections, especially in the United States.
History
Elections were used as early in history as ancient Greece and ancient Rome and throughout the Medieval period to select rulers such as the Holy Roman Emperor (see imperial election) and the Pope (see papal election).
In Vedic period of India, the Raja (chiefs) of a gana (a tribal organization) was apparently elected by the gana. The Raja belonged to the noble Kshatriya varna (warrior class) and was typically a son of the previous Raja. However, the gana members had the final say in his elections. Even during the Sangam Period people elected their representatives by casting their votes and the ballot boxes — usually a pot — were tied by rope and sealed. After the election the votes were taken out and counted. The Pala King Gopala (ruled c. 750s–770s CE) in early medieval Bengal was elected by a group of feudal chieftains. Such elections were quite common in contemporary societies of the region. In the Chola Empire, around 920 CE, in Uthiramerur (in present-day Tamil Nadu), palm leaves were used for selecting the village committee members. The leaves, with candidate names written on them, were put inside a mud pot. To select the committee members, a young boy was asked to take out as many leaves as the number of positions available. This was known as the Kudavolai system.
The first recorded popular elections of officials to public office, by majority vote, where all citizens were eligible both to vote and to hold public office, date back to the ephors of Sparta in 754 B.C., under the mixed government of the Spartan Constitution. Athenian democratic elections, where all citizens could hold public office, were not introduced for another 247 years, until the reforms of Cleisthenes. Under the earlier Solonian Constitution circa 574 B.C., all Athenian citizens were eligible to vote in the popular assemblies, on matters of law and policy, and as jurors, but only the three highest classes of citizens could vote in elections. Nor were the lowest of the four classes of Athenian citizens — as defined by the extent of their wealth and property, rather than by birth — eligible to hold public office, through the reforms of Solon. The Spartan election of the ephors, therefore, also predates the reforms of Solon in Athens by approximately 180 years.
Questions of suffrage, especially suffrage for minority groups, have dominated the history of elections. Males, the dominant cultural group in North America and Europe, often dominated the electorate and continue to do so in many countries. Early elections in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States were dominated by landed or ruling class males. However, by 1920, all Western European and North American democracies had universal adult male suffrage — except Switzerland — and many countries began to consider women’s suffrage. Despite legally mandated universal suffrage for adult males, political barriers were sometimes erected to prevent fair access to elections.
History of democracy
Historically, democracies and republics have been rare. Republican theorists linked democracy to small size: as political units grew in size, the likelihood increased that the government would turn despotic. At the same time, small political units were vulnerable to conquest. Montesquieu wrote, "If a republic be small, it is destroyed by a foreign force; if it be large, it is ruined by an internal imperfection." According to Johns Hopkins University political scientist Daniel Deudney, the creation of the United States, with its large size and its system of checks and balances, was a solution to the dual problems of size.
The term "democracy" first appeared in ancient Greek political and philosophical thought in the city-state of Athens during classical antiquity. The word comes from demos, "common people" and kratos, "strength". Led by Cleisthenes, Athenians established what is generally held as the first democracy in 508–507 BC. Cleisthenes is referred to as "the father of Athenian democracy.”
Athenian democracy took the form of a direct democracy, and it had two distinguishing features: the random selection of ordinary citizens to fill the few existing government administrative and judicial offices, and a legislative assembly consisting of all Athenian citizens. All eligible citizens were allowed to speak and vote in the assembly, which set the laws of the city state. However, Athenian citizenship excluded women, slaves, foreigners and men under 20 years of age. Owning land was not a requirement for citizenship, but it did allow one to purchase land. The exclusion of large parts of the population from the citizen body is closely related to the ancient understanding of citizenship. In most of antiquity, the benefit of citizenship was tied to the obligation to fight war campaigns.
Athenian democracy was not only direct in the sense that decisions were made by the assembled people, but also the most direct in the sense that the people through the assembly, boule and courts of law controlled the entire political process and a large proportion of citizens were involved constantly in the public business. Even though the rights of the individual were not secured by the Athenian constitution in the modern sense — the ancient Greeks had no word for "rights," the Athenians enjoyed their liberties not in opposition to the government, but by living in a city that was not subject to another power and by not being subjects themselves to the rule of another person.
Range voting appeared in Sparta as early as 700 BC. The Apella was an assembly of the people, held once a month, in which every male citizen of at least 30 years of age could participate. In the Apella, Spartans elected leaders and cast votes by range voting and shouting; the vote is then decided on how loudly the crowd shouts. Aristotle called this "childish," as compared with the stone voting ballots used by the Athenians. Sparta adopted it because of its simplicity, and to prevent any bias voting, buying or cheating that was predominant in the early democratic elections. Vaishali, capital city of the Vajjian Confederacy, India was also considered one of the first examples of a republic around the 6th century BCE.
Even though the Roman Republic contributed significantly to many aspects of democracy, only a minority of Romans were citizens with votes in elections for representatives. The votes of the powerful were given more weight through a system of gerrymandering, so most high officials, including members of the Senate, came from a few wealthy and noble families. In addition, the overthrow of the Roman Kingdom was the first case in the Western world of a polity being formed with the explicit purpose of being a republic, although it didn't have much of a democracy. The Roman model of governance inspired many political thinkers over the centuries, and today's modern representative democracies imitate more the Roman than the Greek models because it was a state in which supreme power was held by the people and their elected representatives, and which had an elected or nominated leader. Other cultures, such as the Iroquois Nation in the Americas between around 1450 and 1600 AD also developed a form of democratic society before they came in contact with the Europeans. This indicates that forms of democracy may have been invented in other societies around the world.
Early modern period
In 17th century England, there was renewed interest in the Magna Carta. The Parliament of England passed the Petition of Right in 1628 which established certain liberties for subjects. The English Civil War from 1642–1651 was fought between the king and an oligarchic but elected Parliament, during which the idea of a political party took form with groups debating rights to political representation during the Putney Debates of 1647. Subsequently, The Protectorate from 1653–59 and the English Restoration in 1660 restored more autocratic rule, although Parliament passed the Habeas Corpus Act in 1679 which strengthened the convention that forbade detention lacking sufficient cause or evidence. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Bill of Rights was enacted in 1689 which codified certain rights and liberties and is still in effect. It set out the requirement for regular elections, rules for freedom of speech in Parliament and limited the power of the monarch, ensuring that — unlike much of Europe at the time — royal absolutism would not prevail. Economic historians Douglass North and Barry Weingast have characterized the institutions implemented in the Glorious Revolution as a resounding success in terms of restraining the government and ensuring protection for property rights.
In the Cossack republics of Ukraine in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Cossack Hetmanate and Zaporizhian Sich, the holder of the highest post of Hetman was elected by the representatives from the country's districts.
In North America, representative government began in Jamestown, Virginia, with the election of the House of Burgesses — forerunner of the Virginia General Assembly — in 1619. English Puritans who migrated from 1620 established colonies in New England whose local governance was democratic; although these local assemblies had some small amounts of devolved power, the ultimate authority was held by the Crown and the English Parliament. The Puritans or Pilgrim Fathers, Baptists and Quakers who founded these colonies applied the democratic organization of their congregations also to the administration of their communities in worldly matters.
18th and 19th centuries
The first Parliament of Great Britain was established in 1707, after the merger of the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland under the Acts of Union. Although the monarch increasingly became a figurehead, Parliament was only elected by male property owners, which amounted to 3% of the population in 1780. The first known British person of African heritage to vote in a general election, Ignatius Sancho, voted in 1774 and 1780. During the Age of Liberty in Sweden from 1718–1772, civil rights were expanded and power shifted from the monarch to parliament. The taxed peasantry was represented in parliament — although with little influence — but commoners without taxed property had no suffrage.
The creation of the short-lived Corsican Republic in 1755 marked the first nation in modern history to adopt a democratic constitution. All men and women above age of 25 could vote. This Corsican Constitution was the first based on Enlightenment principles and included female suffrage, something that was not granted in most other democracies until the 20th century.
In the American colonial period before 1776 and for some time after, often only adult white male property owners could vote; enslaved Africans, most free black people and most women were not extended the franchise. This rule changed state by state, beginning with the republican State of New Connecticut, soon after called Vermont which — on declaring independence of Great Britain in 1777 — adopted a constitution modeled on Pennsylvania's with citizenship and democratic suffrage for males with or without property, and went on to abolish slavery. The American Revolution led to the adoption of the United States Constitution in 1787, the oldest surviving, still active, governmental codified constitution. The Constitution provided for an elected government and protected civil rights and liberties for some but did not end slavery nor extend voting rights in the United States, instead leaving the issue of suffrage to the individual states. Generally, states limited suffrage to white male property owners and taxpayers. At the time of the first Presidential election in 1789, about 6% of the population was eligible to vote. The Bill of Rights in 1791 set limits on government power to protect personal freedoms but had little impact on judgements by the courts for the first 130 years after ratification.
In 1789, Revolutionary France adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and, although short-lived, the National Convention was elected by all men in 1792. The Polish-Lithuanian Constituton of May 3, 1791, sought to implement a more effective constitutional monarchy, introduced political equality between townspeople and nobility and placed the peasants under the protection of the government — mitigating the worst abuses of serfdom. In force for less than 19 months, it was declared null and void by the Grodno Sejm that met in 1793. Nonetheless, the 1791 Constitution helped keep alive Polish aspirations for the eventual restoration of the country's sovereignty over a century later.
However, in the early 19th century, little of democracy — as theory, practice or even as word — remained in the North Atlantic world. During this period, slavery remained a social and economic institution in places around the world. This institution was particularly strong in the United States, where eight serving presidents had owned slaves, and the last 15 slave states kept slavery legal in the American South until the Civil War. Advocating the movement of black people from the U.S. to locations where they would enjoy greater freedom and equality, in the 1820s, the abolitionist members of the American Colonization Society established the settlement of Liberia. The United Kingdom's Slave Trade Act 1807 banned the trade across the British Empire, which was enforced internationally by the Royal Navy under treaties Britain negotiated with other nations. In 1833, the UK passed the Slavery Abolition Act which took effect across the British Empire, although slavery was legally allowed to continue in areas controlled by the East India Co. in Ceylon and in Saint Helena for an additional 10 years.
As the voting franchise in the United Kingdom was increased, it also was made more uniform in a series of reforms that began with the Reform Act 1832 and continued into the 20th century. Universal male suffrage was established in France in March 1848 in the wake of the French Revolution of 1848. It was an important milestone in the history of democracy. In 1848, several revolutions broke out in Europe as rulers were confronted with popular demands for liberal constitutions and more democratic government.
In the United States, the 1828 presidential election was the first in which non-property-holding white males could vote in the vast majority of states. Voter turnout soared during the 1830s, reaching about 80% of the adult white male population in the 1840 presidential election. North Carolina was the last state to abolish property qualification in 1856, resulting in a close approximation to universal white male suffrage — however, tax-paying requirements remained in five states in 1860 and survived in two states until the 20th century. In the 1860 United States Census, the slave population in the United States had grown to four million, and in Reconstruction in the late 1860s after the Civil War, the newly freed slaves became citizens with a nominal right to vote for men. Full enfranchisement of citizens was not secured until after the civil rights movement gained passage by the US Congress of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In 1876 the Ottoman Empire transitioned from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one, and held two elections the next year to elect members to her newly formed parliament. Provisional electoral regulations were issued, stating that the elected members of the Provincial Administrative Councils would elect members to the first Parliament. Later that year, a new constitution was promulgated, which provided for a bicameral Parliament with a Senate appointed by the Sultan and a popularly elected Chamber of Deputies. Only men above the age of 30 who were competent in Turkish and had full civil rights were allowed to stand for election. Reasons for disqualification included holding dual citizenship, being employed by a foreign government, being bankrupt, employed as a servant, or having "notoriety for ill deeds." Full universal suffrage was achieved in 1934.
In 1893 the self-governing colony New Zealand became the first country in the world — except for the short-lived 18th-century Corsican Republic — to grant active universal suffrage by giving women the right to vote.
20th and 21st centuries
20th-century transitions to liberal democracy have come in successive "waves of democracy", variously resulting from wars, revolutions, decolonization and religious and economic circumstances. Global waves of "democratic regression" reversing democratization, have also occurred in the 1920s and 30s, in the 1960s and 1970s and in the 2010s.
World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires resulted in the creation of new nation-states from Europe, most of them at least nominally democratic.
In the 1920s democracy flourished and women’s suffrage advanced, but the Great Depression brought disenchantment; most of the countries of Europe, Latin America, and Asia turned to strong-man rule or dictatorships. Fascism and dictatorships flourished in Nazi Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal, as well as non-democratic governments in the Baltics, the Balkans, Brazil, Cuba and Japan, among others.
World War II brought a definitive reversal of this trend in western Europe. The democratization of the American, British and French sectors of occupied Germany, Austria, Italy and occupied Japan served as a model for the later theory of government change. However, most of Eastern Europe, including the Soviet sector of Germany fell into the non-democratic Soviet bloc.
The war was followed by decolonization, and again, most of the new independent states had nominally democratic constitutions. India emerged as the world's largest democracy and continues to be so. Countries that were once part of the British Empire often adopted the British Westminster system.
By 1960, the vast majority of country-states were nominally democracies, although most of the world's populations lived in nations that experienced sham elections, and other forms of subterfuge — particularly in “Communist” nations and the former colonies.
A subsequent wave of democratization brought substantial gains toward true liberal democracy for many nations. Portugal, Spain and several of the military dictatorships in South America returned to civilian rule in the 1970s and 1980s. This was followed by nations in East and South Asia by the mid-to-late 1980s.
Economic malaise in the 1980s, along with resentment of Soviet oppression, contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the associated end of the Cold War and the democratization and liberalization of the former Eastern bloc countries. The most successful of the new democracies were those geographically and culturally closest to western Europe, and they are now members or candidate members of the European Union. In 1986, after the toppling of the most prominent Asian dictatorship, the only democratic state of its kind at the time emerged in the Philippines with the rise of Corazon Aquino, who would later be known as the Mother of Asian Democracy.
The liberal trend spread to some nations in Africa in the 1990s, most prominently in South Africa. Some recent examples of attempts of liberalization include the Indonesian Revolution of 1998, Bulldozer Revolution in Yugoslavia, Rose Revolution in Georgia, Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan and the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia.
According to Freedom House, starting in 2005, there have been 11 consecutive years in which declines in political rights and civil liberties throughout the world have outnumbered improvements, as populist and nationalist political forces have gained ground everywhere from Poland under the Law and Justice Party to the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte.
According to Freedom House, in 2007 there were 123 electoral democracies (up from 40 in 1972). According to World Forum on Democracy, electoral democracies now represent 120 of the 192 existing countries and constitute 58.2% of the world's population. At the same time liberal democracies i.e., countries Freedom House regards as free and respectful of basic human rights and the rule of law are 85 in number and represent 38% of the global population.
Most electoral democracies continue to exclude those younger than 18 from voting. The voting age has been lowered to 16 for national elections in many countries, including Brazil, Austria, Cuba and Nicaragua. In California, a 2004 proposal to permit a quarter-vote at 14 and a half-vote at 16 was ultimately defeated. In 2008, the German parliament proposed but shelved a bill that would grant the vote to each citizen at birth, to be used by a parent until the child claims it for themselves.
In 2007 the United Nations declared September 15 the International Day of Democracy.
In a Freedom House report released in 2018, democracy scores for most countries declined for the 12th consecutive year. The Christian Science Monitor reported that nationalist and populist political ideologies were gaining ground, at the expense of rule of law, in countries like Poland, Turkey and Hungary. For example, in Poland, the President appointed 27 new Supreme Court judges over objections from the European Union. In Turkey, thousands of judges were removed from their positions following a failed coup attempt during a government crackdown.
Republics, though often associated with democracy because of the shared principle of rule by consent of the governed, are not necessarily democracies, as republicanism does not specify how the people are to rule.
Sham elections
A sham election, or show election, is an election that is held purely for show; that is, without any significant political choice or real impact on results of election.
Sham elections are a common event in dictatorial regimes that feel the need to feign the appearance of public legitimacy. Published results usually show nearly 100% voter turnout and high support — typically at least 80%, and close to 100% in many cases — for the prescribed candidate(s) or for the referendum choice that favors the political party in power. Dictatorial regimes can also organize sham elections with results simulating those that might be achieved in democratic countries.
Sometimes, only one government approved candidate is allowed to run in sham elections with no opposition candidates allowed, or opposition candidates are arrested on false charges — or even without any charges — before the election to prevent them from running.
Ballots may contain only one "yes" option, or in the case of a simple "yes or no" question, security forces often persecute people who pick "no," thus encouraging them to pick the "yes" option. In other cases, those who vote receive stamps in their passport for doing so, while those who did not vote — and thus do not receive stamps — are persecuted as enemies of the people.
In some cases, sham elections can backfire against the party in power, especially if the regime believes they are popular enough to win without coercion or fraud. The most famous example of this was the 1990 Myanmar general election.
Examples of sham elections are the 1929 and 1934 elections in Fascist Italy; elections in Nazi Germany; 1940 elections of the People’s Parliaments in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; 1928, 1935, 1943, 1949, 1951 and 1958 elections in Portugal; elections in post-revolutionary Iran, 1991 Kazakh presidential election, those in most communist and socialist states e.g. East Germany, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and the 1995 and 2002 Iraq Presidential referendums under Saddam Hussein.
A predetermined conclusion is always established by the regime through suppression of the opposition, coercion of voters, vote rigging, reporting a number of votes received greater than the number of voters, outright lying or some combination of these.
In an extreme example, Charles D. B. King of Liberia was reported to have won by 234,000 votes in the 1927 general election, a "majority" that was over 15 times larger than the number of eligible voters.
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