30.6.05

The inalienable right to sports funding

29.6.05

Votes for crims in RI

In response to a strong lobbying effort by a coalition of civil rights organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Rhode Island legislature today approved legislation paving the way for a Constitutional amendment to restore voting rights to probationers and parolees.
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"Expanding our democracy, as the proposed amendment would, is in everyone�s interest -- it promotes rehabilitation and increases voter participation, both cornerstones of America's criminal justice and electoral systems," said Laleh Ispahani, the national ACLU's Felon Re-enfranchisement Fellow.

Minority communities in the state disproportionately bear the burden of voter disenfranchisement, with one in five black men and one in 11 Hispanic men ineligible to vote, according to a report by the Rhode Island Family Life Center. The organization also reports that Rhode Island disfranchises a greater percentage of its African American residents than Mississippi, Georgia, Texas and 34 other states. With long probation sentences increasingly the norm in Rhode Island, some felons are prevented from voting for decades after they have reentered the community.

What is liberal democracy?

Economic democracy demands property rights, transparency and competition. Political democracy demands institutions, impartial bureaucracies that give fair and fearless advice, and then implement the will of the people through their elected leaders.

The other leg in this tripod of political and economic democracy is social democracy to ensure people have other freedoms - from the fear of sickness, accidents, or old age. This creates the social mobility necessary in a modern society.

A nice ID-ea that the end is coming soon

It is a doomed Bill because even if thunder and lightning cannot stop it, and even if the House cannot stop it dead in its tracks tonight, we know for sure that it is doomed to overrun its budget and to spiral in costs. The scheme will experience IT failure and the Bill will not achieve any of the claims that the Government make for it. We also know that the scheme will become especially unpopular at exactly the wrong point of the political cycle. There will come a time when not one Labour MP will want to be reminded that they voted for the Bill.

28.6.05

Latest Chavez poll

Polling Data

If an election took place today, which party would you vote for?

Fifth Republic Movement (Pro-Chavez MVR) 41.7%

Justice First (PJ) 9.1%

Democratic Action (AD) 6.2%

Project Venezuela (Proven) 5.2%

Social Christian Party (Copei) 1.5%

PR and not-extremism

"The usual argument is that first-past-the-post chokes off extremists. Well my argument is that it facilitates extremists because political parties camp on the middle ground,"

Bungling Bulgarian journos

For the allocation of seats among the parties and coalitions, what is known as the D’Ondt method is used. This is a set of complicated mathematical algorithms and formulae.

27.6.05

When politicians attack

A Labor Party debate on delaying the leadership primaries came to an abrupt end yesterday when clashes broke out among participants and a former Knesset member tried to assault Ehud Barak. The party moved immediately to vote, deciding to push back the election date indefinitely.

Former MK Addisu Messele, a supporter of Labor leadership contender Amir Peretz, mounted the platform where former prime minister Barak, also a candidate to lead the party, was sitting.

Messele called Barak "the king of fakes in the Israeli political system," shouting, "Ehud ran out on the Labor Party and returned in order to destroy what is left."

Messele's remarks sparked a brawl among audience members, during which Messele tried to reach Barak. He was prevented from doing so by the former prime minister's bodyguards.

The hall in which Labor held its central committee meeting was in a shambles. Addisu Messele, who broke the meeting up, sat stunned on his chair. Amir Peretz, who had sent him to the podium to speak, sat on another chair, sipping water. Peretz's men stood on chairs making obscene gestures at Ehud Barak, who stood on the stage like Churchill, holding up his thumbs in a victory sign.

Peretz's associates said that Messele was angered by a Barak supporter who shouted, "Dirty Ethiopian, go home."

Book-burner, moi?

The author of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital [why left in German, not just Capital? a little too resonant perhaps?] may be the godfather of more misery, death and criminality than any other figure from the last 200 years. But he speaks, across the decades, and over a mountain of corpses, to an eternal yearning on the part of intellectuals.

Same arguments, with added palm trees

Whether a system works or not depends on more than the ideological configuration of the society, or on mathematical calculations as to what is "fair" or not. It depends as well on the configuration of the parties, the country's political history and political culture, the disposition of its basic political leaders and the assumptions which inform their basic political practices, and the incentives which exist to encourage them to behave in a particular way.

25.6.05

Degree in the bloody obvious?

Tony Blair would have failed to win an overall majority had the election been held under a system of proportional representation, according to a new study.

23.6.05

Technology and democracy

The Chinese government is mainly to blame for this, but it's important to consider the way in which U.S. technology is being used to stifle free speech in China - and the extent to which U.S. companies are responsible for this usage. This includes not only Microsoft, but also Cisco Systems and others.

Way back in 2001, according to this report... by the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, Cisco was courting the Chinese Public Security bureau for business. Author Ethan Gutmann has reported similar things. As have Amnesty International and the Open Net Initiative. Cisco denies any direct involvement or knowledge in how its products were going to be used. Nobody can 100% confirm anything. But are we just going to take Cisco's word for it and leave it at that? Seems like the MSM is, and so are our government leaders, but I'm frankly not convinced. I do not believe the questions should be dropped simply because lots of people find these questions really annoying and inconvenient - or because the answers are likely to fall into murky grey areas that can't easily be defined as "good" or "evil."

Entrenching democracy in Taiwan

There were four main changes:

(1) Taiwan abandoned the practice of electing the 225-member Legislative Yuan in a few large multimember seats, part of its inheritance from Japanese colonialism. It will now be elected in 73 constituencies, each of which will return one member on a first-past-the-post basis. Every voter will also vote from proportional representation lists; 40 members of Parliament will be elected this way. Thus a future Legislative Yuan will have 113 members, half as many as today.
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(2) The term of the Legislative Yuan has been extended from three to four years. The present chamber will stay in office until 2008, when the next presidential and parliamentary elections are both held. This reform has been justified as reducing the frequency of elections, but its main result will be political. With the presidency and Parliament subject to the same political mood among the electorate, a president now has a better chance of winning a majority in Parliament.

(3) There is a change in the rules of impeachment of the president and vice president. The initial impeachment resolution will require a simple Legislative Yuan majority, while passage will need two-thirds.
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(4) Since the National Assembly will no longer be the arbiter of constitutional change, people exercising their universal suffrage will have the last word.

22.6.05

When is a democracy not a democracy...?

The laws that strip ex-offenders of the right to vote across the United States are the shame of the democratic world. Of an estimated five million Americans who were barred from voting in the last presidential election, a majority would have been able to vote if they had been citizens of countries like Britain, France, Germany or Australia.

21.6.05

Free to choose? Not in Singapore

Those lazy EU stereotypes

20.6.05

Wrangling ends in Ramallah

...the parliament in the West Bank city of Ramallah decided in a 43-14 vote on Saturday to back the new electoral law which will see the number of deputies increase from 88 to 132.

Half the deputies will be elected in constituencies by a traditional first past the post system. The other half will be chosen by proportional representation in which voters will cast their ballots for the different parties.

The factions will then choose their representatives according the percentage of votes cast.

Albania's election campaign

In late May, both the main parties took out attack advertisements in the Tirana press in which they gave their opponents' office and home telephone numbers, effectively inviting their supporters to hurl abuse down the line. Inexplicably, the Democratic Party's (DP) advertisement showed the wife of Prime Minister Fatos Nano, leader of the Socialist Party (PS), carrying a massive condom.

Defending the Israeli electoral system

Israel has been a functioning, stable, constant democracy for all 57 years of its existence. It has never experienced anything close to a constitutional crisis. It has never experienced civil war, a military coup, or a revolution, or any attempt at them. There was never any need for a military intervention to protect the election results, election results were never contested, and democratic processes were never suspended.

That in itself is quite an achievement. There are very few countries that share this achievement — 21 to be precise...

17.6.05

Democracy, sorry, I mean hypocrisy

Q: Can I turn you for a moment to the Iran statement that the President issued earlier today. I'll read you three lines from it: "Iran's rulers denied more than 1,000 people who put themselves forward as candidates, including popular reformers and women who have done so much. The Iranian people deserve a genuinely democratic system in which elections are honest. They deserve freedom of assembly so Iranians can gather and press for any reform in a peaceful, loyal opposition that can keep the government in check." Scott, can you tell us, if we wanted to insert the word "Egypt" every place you had Iran, and "Egyptians" everyplace you had Iranians, would you consider that also a fair statement of the administration policy?

MR. McCLELLAN: A couple of things. First of all, just on the general statement, different circumstances require different strategies, and people are going to proceed at different -- at a different pace in different parts of the world. The President has said that in his remarks. You heard it in his inaugural address.

In terms of Iran, this is a message to the people of Iran. The President is saying that we stand with the people of Iran who seek greater freedom. You have an unelected few mullahs who are denying the people of Iran their rights. This is a country run by an unelected few who threw a thousand people off the ballot, including all the women who were seeking to run for office. This is a group of an unelected few that are denying the people their rights. They're denying freedom of press; they're denying freedom of assembly; they're denying rule of law; they're denying equal justice; they're denying religious freedom to the people of Iran. And we are going to stand with the people of Iran and the people elsewhere in the world who seek greater freedom.

In Egypt, the President has made it very clear that we appreciate the step that they are taking to have multi-candidate and multi-party presidential elections. That's an important step. And it's important that Egypt follow through on that commitment and have free and fair elections.

Iran is not having truly free and fair elections. This is something being driven by the unelected few.

Q: Would you say, Scott, just to follow up on that, that the Iranian election that takes place tomorrow -- which does have at least some multiple candidates -- it clearly is not a form of Jeffersonian democracy -- but would you say that it is a more advanced democratic step than, say, an ally like Saudi Arabia has conducted in the past year?

MR. McCLELLAN: I would say what we've said on Iran, and you know what we've said on Saudi Arabia, too.

16.6.05

Berlin reds

Two leftist groups that aim to take votes from the Social Democrats at Germany's upcoming general election agreed on Wednesday to name their rapidly-formed alliance the 'Democratic Left.PDS'.
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The rebel ex-leader of German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats (SPD), Oskar Lafontaine, said last week he would run as a candidate for the leftist bloc. Opinion polls are mixed over the its potential, with predictions of between 8 and 18 percent support.

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Peter Hain = Robert Mugabe

It is the Mugabe-isation of Welsh politics

"The government will . . . end what is widely accepted as the abuse in the assembly's electoral system, which enables 'losers' to become 'winners'[*]."
He cited the example of the battle for the Clwyd West constituency in 2003 when five candidates stood, four of whom became assembly members (AMs) – one as the constituency candidate and three others on the regional PR top-up list.
"For losing candidates to be able to become AMs, claiming to represent the constituents they were defeated by devalues the integrity of the assembly electoral system and is a disincentive to vote

15.6.05

PR and turnout

Countries which elect their governments using proportional voting systems have higher turnouts among voters than those using first-past-the-post, electoral specialists have found.

Nations using PR had average turnouts of 70 per cent - 10 per cent higher than those, such as Britain, which use non-proportional systems.

The analysis of turnout in 164 countries, by Professor Pippa Norris of Harvard University, was seized on yesterday by MPs who said PR may be an answer to addressing the worrying lack of voter engagement in the UK.

14.6.05

A forgotten election?

In all, eight candidates are competing in the June 17 presidential vote. If the top candidate fails to garner a majority of the vote, the two leading vote-getters will face off in a second-round of voting in late June.

Results of a recent opinion survey, conducted by the Iran Student Polling Agency, showed that Rafsanjani’s support has slipped slightly from a high of almost 35 percent down to 28 percent. However, that figure is roughly equal to the combined level of support for the four conservative candidates. The second most popular candidate was Qalibaf with 14 percent, according to the student poll, which was conducted May 31-June 1 and is based on over 4,700 interviews. No margin of error was cited in the poll.

There are three reform-leaning candidates in the campaign. One, Mustafa Moin, a former education minister in incumbent president Mohammad Khatami’s administration, came in third in the student’s poll with just over 10 percent support.

The emerging European demos

...the different analyses presented here clearly show that national and European identities are compatible. This finding is not particularly surprising, but a number of further points should be highlighted. First, and as mentioned above, our data does not support the idea of a transfer of identity from the national to the European level. We hypothesised that these two identities are compatible because they are of different order and endowed with different meanings.

Frankly Britain has become a massive liability to the European project.
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Here's the thing that the British don't seem to understand about Europe: most of the people in the other member states actually want it to work. Weird, huh? How you define "work" is, of course, open to interpretation and that's where the various disagreements between the other member states arise. With Britain though, there's a real sense that the whole nation is a sullen child been dragged along on a family excursion... a spoiler, absolutely determined to make it as unpleasant as possible for everyone involved.

13.6.05

Boring, boring, boring

Britain does need a fairer electoral system, but PR is not the answer. Proportional representation prevents voters from kicking out unpopular government and leads to extremist and minority parties being elected with as little as 5 per cent of the vote.

How the left lost the people

9.6.05

Should Tories love PR?

The Tories, it would appear, haven’t yet spent long enough in opposition to bother looking seriously at the ways in which the system they so ardently support is so prejudiced against them. It obviously didn’t matter when they were in power, then the natural choice for the next Tory leader turned up on the other side, while a succession of odd little bald men led the party from one embarrassing defeat to another. They may yet spend another generation in the political wilderness, but looking at all the possible solutions, including electoral reform, would surely be a good idea.

One most excellent reason to support PR

Luckily we have proof; iron-clad, impenetrable proof that what we are doing is Right: we’ve pissed off the government whips. Anything that sticks in the craw of a snivelling, weasly, yes-man, dogsbody who epitomises all that is sickening about career politicians has to be not just good, but positively angelic.

8.6.05

AMS the wrong way

Attempting to calm fears that Utah's lone Democrat in Congress could be redistricted out of office if the state gets a fourth House seat [it currently has three], a nonprofit group has developed a novel idea: electing the new seat at-large.
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But majority and minority leadership are not yet supporting the [redistricting] legislation, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has said she worries the bill could endanger the seat for Rep. Jim Matheson, a Utah Democrat in a mostly Republican district.

DC Vote, a group pushing the legislation, says their solution could garner full support since essentially it would guarantee Matheson keeps his seat, the district gains a vote and Republicans pick up an additional House member.

Votes for the intelligent

It would work as follows. Instead of asking people to say yes or no, we ask them to vote the sum of money they’d pay to sign up [to, for example, the European Constitution] or not. In our example, the votes would be:

Alan - £20 to sign up.

Bill - £20 to sign up.

Charlie - £100 to say no.

Then, rather than count votes, we add up the money, and go with the biggest sum. So in this case we stay out.

The next step is crucial. Each voter pays a tax according to whether his vote made a difference. Alan and Bill pay no tax because their vote has not affected the outcome. But Charlie must pay £40 – because had he not voted, our trio would have signed up to the constitution, giving Alan and Bill £40.

The Government admitted this week that more than a million families have yet to do anything with vouchers for at least £250 it posted to each of them before April 5.

That was the deadline the Government set for distributing 2 million Child Trust Fund (CTF) vouchers to parents or guardians of every baby born since September 1, 2002.

7.6.05

In Taiwan, turkeys do vote for Christmas

Last August, lawmakers passed constitutional amendments that would halve the number of legislative seats from the current 225 down to 113 and adopt a "single-member district, two-vote system" for legislative elections, starting in 2008. At that time, lawmakers' terms are also to be lengthened from three to four years.

After the assembly is eliminated, bills regarding amendments and territory changes will need to be ratified by the public via referendum after being passed by the legislature.

6.6.05

Just desserts

Airbrushing dictators

General Pervez Musharraf would give up his uniform if he decides to contest the 2007 presidential elections, foreign minister Mr Khurshid Kasuri has said.

3.6.05

Citizen’s Basic Income

Instead of cloggingup the market with ever more prescriptive rules in ever more detail, scrap them all, but hand more power to labour by providing a Citizen’s Basic Income. Workers thus have a great deal more bargaining power for they can indeed, at less (but not no) risk, quit and go elsewhere.
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Yes, everyone gets it whether they work or not. It replaces unemployment pay, tax credits, State pensions, child benefit, rent allowances, incapacity benefit, everything, the entire panoply of the welfare state. There is no means testing, no withdrawal of the income as you work. Anything you earn is over and above the benefit.

Corruption and closed-list PR

In Israel, people vote for a party rather than an individual, leaving the party to decide which individuals should fill any seats it wins. Thus if, say, the Likud opted to repay Tzahi Hanegbi for having given numerous jobs to friends and relatives of party hacks by awarding him a "safe" slot on the party's next Knesset list, Likud voters would have no way to oust him, however much they despised his reported corrupt use of their tax shekels — unless they were willing to abandon their party en masse.

Open-list systems come in several variations, but here is one example: The country is divided into large, multi-seat electoral districts, each of which elects, say, five or 10 legislators. Within each district, parties can run multiple candidates, but each voter casts a ballot for only one candidate, by name. The seats are then divided according to the proportion of the vote won by each party: If, for instance, Labor's candidates collectively won 40 percent of the vote in a given district, Labor would receive two of that district's five seats. But instead of the party choosing the occupants of those seats, they would go to the candidates who won the most votes in that district.

In other words, if the 40% of voters who chose Labor candidates collectively cast 1,000 votes for candidate A, 800 for B, 600 for C, 400 for D and 200 for E, the district's two Labor MKs would be A and B – even if D and E were the party's preferred choices. This enables voters to punish a particular incumbent for corruption while still voting for members of the party they prefer.

2.6.05

Old habits, and all that...

Parliament in the Maldives has unanimously voted to back plans to give the nation its first multi-party democracy, the government has said.

President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who came to power in 1978, says he wants the system in place by December.

Ahead of the sitting, four leading dissidents had been arrested.

Palm trees, bobbies on the beat and electoral reform

We shouldn’t be talking about independence as a first means to untie us from Mother UK. Rather, about completely overhauling our archaic (read, British) electoral system, and making, ‘One Man, One Vote, of Equal Value’ really mean something. Instead of the fuzzy, racially charged slogan it was leading up to 1998.

At present my vote does not mean the same as my neighbour’s. At the last General Election both parties in Bermuda were separated by some four to five per cent of the popular vote. Yet once in Government the seat margin is 22 per cent (22 PLP to 14 UBP). If popular vote were used to tally actual Parliamentary seats, the UBP would have 17 seats and the PLP 19. Such a slim majority for a ruling party could be both better (more compromise and dialogue to get things done) and worse (fluid platforms and party policy).
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University of Victoria’s political scientist Norman Ruff says about any PR system: “Your vote isn’t just counted, it actually counts. It throws the whole debate over electoral systems toward the individual voter rather than the point of view of the [MPs].”

Perhaps Bermuda politics needs just such a grassroots electoral overhaul. And a way out of our current democratic deficit, creating an accepted vortex of bickering and partisanship.

Y oh Y

Kuwaiti men have been casting ballots in the last elections in the Gulf state before women get the right to vote.
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Women will be able to take part in parliamentary elections in 2007 and the next local elections in 2009.

1.6.05

Pioneering PR advocate