Blog 13 Seat Sale: Money Buys Elections

                                                                      

        The Cogs Blog

Blog 13  Seat Sale:  Money Buys Elections

Election fraud? No, perfectly legal! Three cases on point:

Case 1. U.S. About 20 years ago I came on a report that in two of the 1990's elections, the percentages were 85% and over 90%.

What percentages? the percentage of winning candidates who just happened to be the candidates who had spent the most money on their campaigns. Yes, 90% of the candidates who won were the candidates who had spent the most money.

Case 2. Canada. At the time I was curious because I had in my possession the candidates' expense figures for a provincial election in Canada. Of 103 seats I had the spending figures for 102. (Number 103 was under investigation by the electoral authorities for overspending the legal limits.) I did the arithmetic. The percentage? About 70% (71 of 102) of the seats were won by the candidates who spent the most money.

Case 3  In the small town where I now live, a recent election saw three candidates running for mayor. One of them had obviously spent more than the other two put together: signs everywhere - big signs. Slam dunk? Surprise! That candidate ran third! 

The lesson; in all this? Well, a national electoral district has a very large number of voters; a province or state, a smaller number; and the town, fewer still. Democracy, I would conclude, is more likely to work in a small population.

That should not be surprising. Democracy probably originated in the small city states of ancient Greece about 2500 years ago. There, citizens debated in the marketplace issues of war and peace, civic projects and - taking Athens as an example - whether any single citizen was getting too powerful and needed to be exported for a time. The Athenians had a practice at election time of scratching on a piece of broken pottery the name of one citizen, and throwing the shard into an urn. When the "votes" in the urn were counted, the candidate with the  best score was exiled from the city for ten years. Interesting practice? Any candidates in mind in your town?

The shards were called ostrakoi; and English still has the word "ostracism", meaning banishment, though in a purely social sense.

Could we consider election attack ads on television a perverted descendant of "ostracism"? They both involve a kind of stone throwing.

Well, it is a very short jump from this thought to the shocking opening line of my next blog: "I do not think Americans are going to recover their lost democracy any time soon." But there is one possible hope for a better outcome.