Election embarrassment?

America’a election process is an embarrassment
CNN Anchor Fareed Zakaria is not happy with his adopted homeland.
It seems that our highly decentralized system of voting is too archaic for him. It seems our transplant from South Asia, and I am glad he chose to immigrate to the United States and become a United States citizen, sees much more value in having instantaneous results available the moment the polls close according to some national schedule run by a centralized national board. All that would be fine, if all we were deciding was who was going to be president; unfortunately, (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) when we hold our general elections we are not just voting who will get to live in the White House for the next four years.
My first problem with Mr. Zakaria’s viewpoint is that it assumes that the central government always can do things better than the local government. Now, I would say that such a view is open to considerable debate. I think a lot of people in America would look at the statement: “I’m here from the federal government and I’m here to help” as an oxymoron.
I suspect, but I do not know with any certainty, that Mr. Zakaria’s grounding in American history is a bit on the shallow side. It certainly seems that he doesn’t understand that, as former House Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-MA) once was quoted as saying, “All politics are local.”
And when you are dealing with a country that has in excess of 300 million citizens (of whom about half are voters) and extends over about six time zones, that trying to run everything from an Election Central really isn’t all that feasible … or even practical.
The second problem is that he keeps confusing the U.S. with being a democracy. It isn’t. It is a democratic federal republic and that is not like the governmental organization that he grew up with. It is a different beast and a lot of people these days, addicted as we are to our ability to instantly communicate seem to think that we need to centralize not only our news gathering processes, but we also need to centralize all our political processes.
Now, looking at it from a news gathering perspective makes a whole heck of a lot of sense. It is literally easier for a journalist if all political decisions are made in one place rather then having to run around to a bunch of places to find out what political decisions are being made. I know, I have had to do that. One little newspaper (with our staff of five) found ourselves run ragged covering the local news, which included a county council, five city councils, several unincorporated communities, four different public utility organizations, two school boards, a community college, and a host of other local agencies and boards that spent public funds … and that was right there with telling the stories of our churches and schools and interesting people, as well as keeping tabs on a state senator, three state assembly representatives, a U.S. Representative, two U.S. Senators and a plethora of state elected and unelected officials. That is not counting 19 fire departments, seven different law enforcement agencies and some other stuff.
I would have loved to have had to go to just one stop, and have all that news just handed to me, but that is not what America is.
Mr. Zakaria needs to realize that, despite what he may think, we pride ourselves in governing ourselves. (Or at least we used to; his views have me getting worried). That means local people doing stuff like running elections because they include not only national elections but state, region, county, city, township and district elections. That is why ballots sometimes run to several pages, unless you want to put it all in such tiny type we all have to bring huge magnifying glasses to read the ballot.
No, his complaint is that when we hold a presidential election, we also hold all these other elections at the same time. He needs to get with the program here.
He also pointed out that our system relies a bunch on local people being honest. Heck, a whole bunch of states don’t require identification to vote … I seem to remember that the Democrats think that is an evil conspiracy by the Republicans to depress their vote.
Well, my point would be that I would much rather have a bunch of people trying to do their best at the local level, then to have some amorphous so-called “non-partisan” group from “Mount Olympus” trying to run the show.
Of course, modern technology would be wonderful and it would be wonderful if there was a one-size fits all solution to all the voting problems that seem to plague every election. But unfortunately, something which Mr. Zakaria seems to fail to address, is that for every solution there is a new problem. And, given what we have seen about computer hacking and other digital fubars, There is a lot to be said for the decentralized system and its ability to point to problems that really involve fraud and abuse.
Lord knows I am not saying the U.S. system is perfect.
To paraphrase my hero Mr. Winston Churchill in what he had to say about democratic forms of government:
It is a very bad way to run elections; it is only that others seem to be so much worse.