It is bemusing for a country that prides itself on a democratic tradition which it energetically exports round the world as a paradigm for modern nation states, that the outcome of its presidential election remained in suspense so long after the polls closed. A travesty, you may cry. A gross distortion of the will of the people.
But the sight of the “world’s greatest democracy” getting its credentials in a knot over who should be pronounced winner in the US presidential elections should remind us that friendship is a two-way process. It is a shameful reflection on our continent that, in their hour of need, we were not there beside our American brothers and sisters to help and advise where we could, in the same way as they do when our elections come around.
We should, no doubt, have established a pan-African Society for the Promotion of Democracy in Primitive Parts which would have established a friendly rapport with the main political leaders – using sign language in the case of George W Bush and reminding Al Gore of the perils of perjury on all possible occasions.
Before the contest we should have set up seminars in the main rural centres, where the various models of democracy would have been explained, including the detail that it is “the people” who are meant to rule and not “the electoral college”. Leaving them toyi-toying with excitement to the chant of “One-American-One-Millionaire” our (expenses-only) volunteers would then have headed out for the wilds, no doubt touting video cameras so that they could later show the folks back home parts that National Geographic doesn’t reach.
In some more obviously dangerous areas they would have derived some comfort from the presence of the boys in the blue berets whom the United Nations would no doubt deploy in defence of innocents against serial killers with cannibalistic appetites – who, as is well-known, populate these parts – not to mention the deranged folk in Texas in whose name the odd passerby is seized from time to time and injected with poison to the edification of a small but appreciative audience. Representatives of our Society for the Promotion of Democracy would no doubt be granted – on the basis of reciprocity – observer status (appropriately dressed, of course in Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, this being no place for the off- handedness of safari gear). There they could bestow the odd “tut-tut” or two in the vicinity of the ballot boxes, between hurried negotiation around the corner with a local dealer in curiosities evocative of street life in the good old US of A.
Gathering in Washington on counting day (well, the first of them at any rate) our observers would then have been in a position this week to have reassured an anxious world that the playing field was flat (with the pardonable exception of a few billion dollars here and there), the contest free and the outcome fair. This we are prevented from doing because of the difficulties being experienced with the votes of a few thousand octogenarians in Palm Beach, Florida, whose major complaint appears to be that they were forced to leave their bifocals outside the polling booth. There also appears to be some suggestion that Pat Buchanan had spread the word in a few upmarket nursing homes that he is actually Jewish. Our parliamentary observer mission under Tony Yengeni would have easily surmised that the problem is that, although there are precedents in the US for different results in the popular vote and electoral college, they date from the 19th century and had more to do with Tammany Hall frauds and disputed tallies than with a straight, unalloyed contradiction of outcomes, as now. What is more, the electoral college is undoubtedly an oddity. It dates from an era when communications were poor, when the emphasis was on states’ rights within a federal system, when it was felt important to oblige candidates to obtain a broad geographical spread of support – and when governing elites in Washington in any case tended to distrust the vagaries of pure, unadulterated democracy. Many will maintain that such an anachronistic mechanism cannot nowadays be allowed to upset a clear if slim popular mandate. The Republicans can argue with justice that they fought the election under an agreed set of rules that included the electoral college system. They will doubtless maintain that were the situation to be reversed, Gore would be unlikely to give away his prize. They will certainly portray Gore as a bad loser, as a man prepared to hold the country to ransom and cultivate a damaging constitutional crisis out of selfish, narrow ambition. Any encouragement given to delegates to the electoral college who may sympathise with Gore’s predicament to switch sides (which has happened occasionally in the past) would also rightly be condemned as gross interference in the long-established democratic process. If Gore loses, his only proper course is to accept a bitter defeat as gracefully as he can – and then, if he has the spirit for it, launch a new campaign for electoral reform. Bush, if he wins, should likewise quickly ask Congress and the Supreme Court to investigate whether the electoral college is still a useful and necessary tool. Such deeply divisive dichotomies must be avoided in future. And if the Americans still haven’t finished their count in the next few weeks, we suggest they take some advice from a real expert in electoral drip-feed tension and send for Judge Johann Kriegler to help sort themselves out.