Specifically when it comes to the selection of the president, is it really a democratic system? The selection of the presidential candidates is somewhat determined behind closed doors by party insiders also known as super-delegates to the party conventions. Meaning that the primary process does not actually directly select the candidates for president. I am not certain that alone prevents the general election from being democratic.
However, given the evidence from both Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, it seems that the general vote does not select the president even within the confusing and archaic electoral college system. There was a recent Ohio report demonstrating that the electronic voting machines made by the company previously known as Diabold, as well as other companies, had significant security problems resulting in a fraudulent outcome for the 2004 election. So what exactly is being done to assure a fair election in 2008? Are these systems to be used again in 2008 given how many states bought them and how little time there is to replace them? Do we just assume that the presidential election process is a sham and the next president is determined not by the people but by the political parties? Doesn’t that kind of citizen apathy result in dictators?
I really want to be part of the solution and not part of the problem but I just don’t see how.
17 December 2007 at 4:20 pm
No, we live in a representative republic. A pure democracy represents a mob-rule majority-based form of government. Thankfully we do not have that as we would soon become a despotic Theocracy with Mike Huckleberry as the king of morality.
17 December 2007 at 4:53 pm
Aside from extremely dubious voting machines and super-delegates, what really makes our election process a sham is the fact whoever has the most money wins. This means that we don’t have a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of, by and for corporations and billionaires.
18 December 2007 at 1:00 pm
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of shenanigans that go on behind the scenes. This push towards automated voting machines is sort of scary. As technology advances, I see people becoming less and less interested in *how* machines work, and more interested in *what* they (appear to) do. However, this is less a function of people becoming lazy (though that’s part of it I think), and more that the technology itself is just becoming so complex that you need to be some kind of expert just to understand the basic principles behind it.