Some say electronic voting is not compatible with democracy. They argue e-voting as e-democracy is not true democracy; that true democracy is extremely cautious of e-voting. For one, those who know or, think their knowing must be the known, say e-voting doesn’t guarantee the vote caster’s cast vote being secret as is expected with the democratic choice by vote.
I once read from the Maxwell-edited 1928 edition of the ‘Gold Coast Handbook’ that Akan democracy was ahead of any in Europe. Ever since, my thinking has been that western democracy isn’t superior to our indigenous systems. Yet, what has been pumped into our heads, as with the many other western ‘knowledge’ forms that were supposed to be the best for us, is the oft quote: ‘government of the people, by the people for the people.’ We would have been best served by measuring this against George Orwell’s idea that not all people are created equal; that there are people who lead (sometimes born to lead) and there are people who follow.
There are people of more substance than others. There are people who know and people who don’t know. The people in the ‘of, by and for’ are therefore not all equal as was proposed. For example, all the people do not have the same chance of being representatives; even equal chance to choose representatives. That’s the first point of not being of, by and for all. Second is the human made machine which gets operated rightly or wrongly or purposely, despite the impression that it functions neutrally and objectively. It’s susceptible to human manipulation!
Thanks for the 2012 election petition hearing. We now know enough of the tricks for ballot counting, which is the crucial point in the election process. We know tally wrongdoings that undid the success of many a candidate. I am technophobic so I dread the machine. That fear has partially been confirmed by the infamous STI episode of 2012.
Recently, in uncle Sammy motherland, we saw someone supervising an election in which he was a candidate. The man wouldn’t listen to calls to resign before the election he was overseeing. Then he accused his rival of cheating by hacking. He resigned only ‘a day after his campaign said he’s captured enough votes to become governor despite his rival’s refusal to concede.’ Which opponent would concede? Certainly I wouldn’t; in the face of such immoral, shameless cheating. Eventually, he asked for the voting machines ‘to be locked up;’ into what prison I marvelled.
How fair a situation in which the arbiter, regulator, monitor, watchman is also a candidate in the same contest, as unfathomable as it was happening in the so-called the world’s foremost democracy. In many ways, it has been an election of malfunctioning machines, machine failure, and machine shortage; some fearing the integrity of the ballot being questioned. In one instance, the impersonal electronic voting produced a result of a dead person being elected.
‘Voting machines fail in majority black neighbourhoods;’ a headline said. That’s abakade! (it’s happened!), an example underscoring machine was made for man to do whatever man wants, good or bad, such as unmake another man or woman’s election victory. In some other election years before, there had been man-made ‘punch-ballot technology’ which produced man-characteristic ‘dimpled’ ballot papers which resulted in votes counted by voting intent rather than as a result of the vote action.
To me, it’s much ado about the electronic vote endangering electronic democracy. Its anti-democracy infesting menace of hacking, suppressing register, social media propaganda, stealing personal details from social media to use in targeted propaganda advertising, are infesting elections everywhere, Brexit and midterms not excluded.
The formula of vote cast vs vote count: vc1+vc2 =ed, where vc1 is vote cast, vc2 is vote count and ed is electronic democracy, was discounted by the LetMyVoteCount movement. Some called the movement ‘ugly noises,’ others extracted the human cost of an honest protester losing an eye from fired police bullet. A supposed doctor’s appalling acid opinion about the injury was that the victim was faking blood by using tomato paste.
We need not, and probably should not, induce an unfelt need into felt need because it’s someone else’s genuine felt need. It’s not much convincing sense to argue we of 14 million voters should do machine voting because USA of 200 million or India of 800 million or China of one billion is doing it. Cheaters will cheat whether you use the most sophisticated machine (the one the governorship contestant supervising his own election says should be locked up) or the crudest Gambian stone counting. Machine lies. We need not try so hard to be like them.
By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh