The Yanks exercise their franchise
A bit on local politics
A lot on the US 2006 midterms and their meanings
A bit about old commissioner Cole
I've written a lot about Australian politics and the re-election of the Victorian ALP on 25 November is the twentieth successive defeat for the state and territory Tory parties. But that may be the end of the ALP's dream run. It looks like even the admittedly appalling leadership of the NSW Libs will find it hard not to win the March 2007 election. With several ministerial scandals, including one minister forced to resign after being accused of child sex offences, the NSW ALP (now the longest serving government in Australia) is on the nose in the worst way and it will take a most creative effort for the Libs to loose this one. And then cometh Peter Dednam ("Dednam Walking", as he's known around here), the local Lib leader: with the Morris "Dilemma" Iemma government all but moribund, he seeks to link the popular Attorney-General Bob Debus with child sex, only to discover that his source is a discredited paedophile. A defeat for the state ALP is likely but can the Libs pull defeat once again from certain victory? Or will Independents win so many seats that parliamentary anarchy will be the only winner? In the meantime other democratic nations have also been voting ...
The phenomenon of the Internet has had unexpected impacts on our lives in many ways that SF writers never even imagined possible. Their utopian futures, full of flying cars and robots and dream/nightmare suburban homes, rarely had room for a micro-computer. (They didn't even see the effect that the automobile would have on marriage/mating patterns and how it would lead to a sexual revolution.) I cannot recall a single story that got even close to picking up on the kinds of influences the world-wide web of interconnected personal computers has actually had on our lives - and on our ability to access information. You might have guessed from my constant iteration of results of Australian federal, state and territory elections that I have an unnatural interest in psephology. This arcane science was difficult to pursue in the days before the Internet, relying on the occasional article from Malcolm Mackerras (usually wrong) or Antony Green (largely correct) for local information on elections, and any sort of reasonable international data was all but impossible to discover. Nowadays there are sophisticated sites for all this data in Australia, and in most other countries that exercise a franchise - particularly in the USofA, where discussion of matters electoral are rife in the weeks and months leading up to the annual voting beanfest on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, and in the days, weeks and months following each election cycle.
Ironically, as far as SF is concerned, the story that sticks in mind in regard to the future exercise of the franchise is an Asimov short story that posited that, as methods of analysing voting trends got more sophisticated, fewer and fewer voters would be required to register an actual vote and a super-computer would eventually extrapolate the nation-wide results at all levels from just one voter. As is the case with most SF-as-prediction, this story has completely missed the nail head. In fact, there are more and more concerns with the ability of any system accurately to predict the actual vote and, particularly after the concerns arising from the Ohio vote at the 2004 presidential elections, increasing concerns with the use of computers as the registry of votes and the tabulators of results. Especially when, as the conspiracy theorists note, the companies providing the software for the voting machines are themselves known partisans of the incumbent president. This year, in one case, the 13th District of Florida, there are concerns with a massive 'undervote' (i.e. an apparent 18,000 voters in Sarasota County, who exercised their franchise in other races the same day, not registering a vote in the congressional race, an undervote rate 5 times higher than in other counties in Fl-13 - Sarasota County used electronic voting machines and the others didn't) and the inability of officials to verify the count manually, because all the records are in a machine and there are no reviewable records. This could conceivably result in paperless voting machines being outlawed in Florida. It looks like those few dystopian stories that cast super-computers as super-villains may have been closer to the mark that those who saw a benevolent super-computer looking after us.
Leaving aside the failure of SF accurately to predict the real world (and that's a rave I might get around to one day), the fact is that increasingly one can follow foreign elections on the 'Net and there's no country that does foreign elections like the US. In fact, they are becoming increasingly more foreign and, eventually, we may have to send in international observers to ensure the fairness of elections in that strange country. First there was the Florida fun in 2000, with hanging chads, butterfly ballots, disqualification of people who had vaguely similar names to known felons and intimidation of voters of color on election day, not to mention that the whole shebang was run by the campaign manager for one of the presidential candidates (a massive conflict of interest that would see an election annulled in any half-way democratic country). For only the second time in history a US president was appointed (this time by the Supreme Court) rather than elected. (The earlier case was in 1876 in case you're asking.) In 2004, there were the conflicts between how people said they voted (according to exit polls) and how the machines said they voted. This had been a problem in Florida in 2000 and was an even greater problem in Ohio in 2004. To such an extent that accusations of rigging of voting computers, or of the software, has been alleged. 2006 promised even more interest, with the possibility that voters would revenge themselves on a feckless president and a corrupt and scandal-beset majority party.
There were a number of sites that I perused in the weeks leading up to the election, to keep track of the polls and what the pundits were predicting. The two best were the Crystal Ball site and electoral-vote.com. The Crystal Ball is run biennially largely by Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia's Center (sic) for Politics. Sabato is a name I know from a book on media feeding frenzies he'd written in the 1990s. It has weekly updates on opinion polls and campaign developments. electoral-vote.com is an independent site run by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, an ex-pat working in Amsterdam; it is updated daily and is a psephologist's dream, providing not only analysis but the data on which it is based. He also had updated predictions on the likely outcome of all marginal races. Both Sabato and Tanenbaum were pretty spot on in their final predictions. Right up to election day, the Senate hung in the balance, although a Democrat majority in the House looked a foregone conclusion. On election day (Tuesday night in the US is Wednesday afternoon in Australia) I followed the counting on the CNN and New York Times websites. Highly entertaining, even allowing for the slowness of the count and the lack of acuity of the commentary. Fortunately, again, the raw data were available for you to draw your own conclusions. The last of the Senate seats wasn't decided that afternoon and it was about 36 hours after the polls closed when the Democrats claimed their 51st senate seat.
With three seats still undecided (including Fl-13), it looks like the Republicans lost 6 Senate and at least 30 House seats. While this is around the mean figure for such losses in the midterms of twen-cen second presidencies (ie 1998 Clinton, 1986 Reagan, 1974 Nixon, 1966 Kennedy-Johnson, 1958 Eisenhower, 1950 Truman, 1938 Roosevelt, 1918 Wilson, and 1906 Roosevelt), the losses are much worse than they seem, for a couple of reasons. First, of the 33 Senate seats contested, the Democrats already had a 18-15 advantage (these were the seats last decided in the year that Bore outpolled Gush); the Republicans have a 40-27 advantage in the Senate seats decided in 2002 and 2004, so any similar swing against them in either 2008 or 2010 will result in far greater losses. As it is, the Democrats now have a 24-9 advantage in the seats decided this year (allowing for two Democrat-leaning independents in the north-east). Second, the loss of seats in the House was cushioned by some extreme gerrymandering of congressional districts. Districting is a matter for each state (and districts are redrawn after each Census, which itself determines how many districts are allocated to each state) and the controlling political party has been, over the last decade or six, seeking to entrench their advantage by drawing up districts in such a way as to favour their own candidates. This is done, for example, by putting antithetical counties all together in one district so that the other mob 'wastes' their additional votes. Despite the best efforts of the Republicans to district states to their advantage, following the 2000 census, when they held a majority of the governorships, and despite the extreme financial and PR advantage afforded by incumbency, the Republicans lost at least 30 seats in 17 different states. This is a slaughter. The Republicans also lost 6 governorships. But the truly remarkable statistic is that the Republicans failed to win a single Democrat-held seat in the House or the Senate or a single Democrat-held governorship. Not one. Not even in seats where the incumbent retired; not even in contests, like the New Jersey senate, where the incumbent was on the nose. In previous years of remarkable one-party sweeps, like the Republican landslide of 1994, there have always been seats that have gone the other way. Not this time. Admittedly, the endorsed Democrat candidate in the Connecticut senate race lost to the sitting, but unendorsed, Democrat running as an independent but, as far as the Republicans were concerned, it was all one-way traffic.
The reasons for the slaughter are almost as interesting. Our Prime Miniature has played down suggestions that the vote was largely a condemnation of the war on Iraq. Not just the incompetent way in which it has been prosecuted, but the war itself. Yet the exit polls clearly showed that the war, and the president's handling of the war on terror generally, was the major reason that people changed votes. Certainly there was a series of scandals, of which the most obvious was the page-fiddling of a prominent Republican congressman. (There were also the resignation of Tom DeLay over campaign finance irregularities and the financial malfeasances associated with Jack Abramoff, among a number of major and minor breaches by the majority party.) And it is true that, because of its tax cuts, Bush has been running increasingly large budget deficits. But, while these things set a mood, it was the failure of the president's Iraq adventure, and the increasing quagmire in that country, that swung the vote so decisively. This message got through to the Shrub (even if it missed his Deputy Sheriff) and Dubya decided that Don Rumsfeld would be the ideal scapegoat.
Bush is now definitely a lame duck - with the last two years of his presidency to be overseen by an antithetical congress - and Teflon Tony has said that he will go gently into that good night some time early next year. The Iraq mess has claimed two out of three but somehow wee John appears to hold on. This is in part because the ALP opposition has been so piss-weak and partly because a legacy of the Keating treasury/premiership has been the continued strength of the Australian economy. But even more than Blair, Howard seems to be able to shrug off the vicissitudes of current events, and the mud has not stuck to him at all. His next test is due late next year; I wonder whether his dominance of local politics will continue, given interest rate rises, real estate price doldrums and Iraq (including any fallout from the AWB report).
It's interesting and instructive to contrast USian 'democratic' practice with that of Australia. It seems to me that we have a much better system. While political parties here seek to entrench majorities, and gerrymander seats to their advantage, the final decisions are made by (largely) independent electoral commissions (admittedly acting on the advice the parties, but making their own final judgments). Similarly the idea that a partisan figure like Katherine Harris (the Florida Attorney-General who was at the same time Bush's 2000 campaign manager in Florida and the person running the election throughout the state) could have such an obvious conflict of interest would be anathema here. There are other aspects of their elections that I find strange and less democratic. Voluntary voting means that fewer people actually exercise their franchise. "Decisions are made by those who turn up to vote," says CJ Cregg. In the US decisions are made by fewer than half the eligible population. There are still many obstacles for minority groups to overcome: from intimidation to restrictions on admission to electoral rolls to the purging of rolls of 'felons' (and those with vaguely similar names). Here the system of voting is uniform throughout the land. Because of our use of preferential ballots, the use of ballot papers is still universal. No electronic or computer-based voting means that votes are open to scrutineers and reviewable. It also means that machine malfunction does not occur, nor are there differences in the standards applied in different constituencies. Looking at Florida in 2000, where richer counties had modern and efficient machinery and poorer counties (more likely to vote Democrat) had less effective ballot mechanisms, the ideal of one-vote, one-value was definitely diminished. Here, we psephologists would not accept the slowness of the count that has been evident this year. As I write this (2 weeks and 2 days after the ballot) there are still 4 undecided congressional districts. One of those is subject to a run-off vote, but the others are hampered by slow counting or the absence of written records that could aid a recount. Even with preferences needing to be distributed, Australian elections are decided much more quickly. The USians could in fact learn from the Australian experience and improve the level of their democracy - but such an outcome appears unlikely.
In the meantime their elections will provide an entertaining spectacle for the interested observer.
The Cole whitewash
The Cole Commission report ["No politicians was hurt in the making of this report"] says that AWB Limited paid bribes to Saddam in order to sell our wheat and that the guilty parties are all connected with the wheat board, not with the government or public service. Shock! Horror! Mind you, for all the crowing from the Howard gang about how they've been exonerated, you'd not know that they were never going to be found to have done wrong. They wrote the commission's terms of reference and whoever writes the terms of reference pretty well has the game sown up. In a sense they are writing the questions and the answers. Only incompetent (or honest) governments get reports that end up flaying them. The Hutton report of January 2004 on the death of the British weapons expert David Kelly was prime example of the government writing terms of reference to get the result they wanted: the government never sexed up the weapons of mass destruction and the only dishonesty was to be found in a BBC reporter who said the Government "probably knew" the intelligence dossier was false. Like Hutton, Cole has said that he was bound by his terms of reference and the government could change them if it wanted a wider inquiry. Fat chance! The government and the Department of Foreign Affairs are 'exonerated' because they made no attempt to find out what was happening. You might think this criminally negligent, especially at a time when the government was saying that it was hyper-aware of all things Iraqi because it was contemplating whether to join its Anglo-American allies in starting a war there. They knew of non-existent WMDs but not of the $200 millions paid in bribes! Pull the other one. Either they are lying or they really are the least competent government in Australian history. But even the cover story is falling apart. Cole said that people like the Australian diplomats at the UN were under no obligation to look in detail at reports going through their office because they were just "postboxes". In order to say that he had to distort the evidence of a previous such diplomat, Genevieve Hamilton, who has now come out and said that this was not her evidence to the commission. The Howard gang is again relying on the ignorance excuse. People lower down the food chain who should have passed along the intelligence about the bribes apparently didn't but, it seems, that is not a sacking offence and Alexander Downer's ignorance is just a given these days.
While this scandal is brewing along nicely, the ALP decides that it is too much like a chance to put the blowtorch to a venal government, so they decide that now is the ideal opportunity to turn the spotlight on themselves - and have a leadership spill. It is to laugh.
First written: December 2006
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