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Vacuum Voting
November 28, 2001
By Denis Solomon
ON December 10 a lot of people, myself included, will be faced with the problem of deciding which is the least bad of the two or three candidates on the ballot. Some may even decide to try "tactical voting", e.g. voting for Team Unity or the NAR, knowing these parties cannot win but hoping they will do well enough to spoil the chances of the UNC or the PNM, whichever the voter hates the most.
But when you think of it, "least bad" can only have meaning on a scale of goodness or badness, which in turn implies that there might at some other time, be a candidate high enough on the scale to bring the benefits the voter desires. "Tactical" voting is even more a counsel of despair, because it implies, in addition, that the voter is writing off this election, and potentially all elections, as a dead loss for the nation.
But let us suppose that there were a candidate who would meet with the approval of our hypothetical voter and fill him or her with enthusiasm on polling day. What, apart from the type of hair on the candidate's head, or the television image of the party leader, would be the defining characteristic of such a candidate?
Certainly not the contents of the manifestos. Not rosy promises of pension increases and matching education grants. Not threats of commissions of enquiry to bring the corrupt to justice. For in nearly 40 years of independence, we have heard all this before. In any case these promises and threats do not distinguish candidates or parties from one another—so much so that the biggest issue in the present campaign is who stole the manifesto from whom.
The plain truth is that such a candidate simply cannot exist. There is no scale of goodness or badness on which we can hope to find a candidate high enough to satisfy our needs, this time or the next. And yet the candidates and the parties have remained the same.
So the only difference is in our hypothetical voter. In him or her, the mindless euphoria of political infancy has been succeeded by world-weary a-plague-on both-your-houses cynicism.
The important question is whether our voter will transcend this disenchantment and, one, realise that the supposedly democratic system he is called upon to operate is at least partially at the root of the problem; and, two, begin to ask himself or herself the theoretical question of whether it could be otherwise, and if so, how.
The basic fact is that when we go to the polls, we think we are voting for the government of our choice, when, in fact, we are merely hoping for it.
However desirable we may consider one party to be in comparison with the others, we have only the remotest influence on whether that party forms the government. We are limited to casting one vote for one person in one constituency, and hoping that enough people in enough of 35 other constituencies will vote for our candidate's party colleagues to enable the party to obtain a majority in the lower house of Parliament.
But even if this turns out in our favour, we have still not elected a government. All we have done is elect a parliament—or rather, elected one member of a parliament. Governments are not elected. They are selected, and the process of selection of the management team to run the country is completely outside the voter's control.
What it amounts to is that if you like Panday for prime minister and you live in San Fernando East, the most you can do is vote for Robin Montano.
If that is not the slough of despond, I don't know what is.
Parties aside, another reason a desirable candidate cannot exist is that the election is national but our voter's mind is local. No broad ideological issues distinguish one party from another, and any such issues would have to do with governance on the national scale. Nowadays, this is true everywhere in the world, let alone in Trinidad and Tobago, where political ideology has never really existed anyway. To the extent that broader issues of governance affect the voter's daily life (water, housing, education) they are long-term. The kind of appeals a candidate must make to a constituency must be short-term ones, realisable in the life of a five-year parliament. By and large, these fall within the domain of local rather than central government.
When Robin Montano talks about setting up a plan for San Fernando East and implementing it in three years, he ought to be running for the City Corporation. Then it wouldn't matter what party he belonged to, if any. As it is, even if you think his ideas are feasible, you have either to believe he can implement them without a UNC victory or accept that a vote for him is a vote for Panday. And even then you have to believe that a Panday government in Whitehall will enable a Montano plan to come to fruition in San Fernando East.
What we need, therefore, is to free ourselves as much as possible from the tyranny of dependence on central government for the majority of our daily concerns, and at the same time achieve as great an influence as possible on the choice of the management team to which we entrust the overall affairs of the nation. The first means, of course, vastly strengthening local government, both in powers and resources.
The second means two things: first, eliminating the intermediacy of Parliament in the process of selecting the national management team. In other words, electing the executive separately from the legislature. This is not only in keeping with our existing political mentality (so much so that we think we are doing it even when we are not) but is also responds to a universal political instinct. I have always said that any referendum question as to whether people would prefer to elect the chief executive directly would receive a near 100 per cent positive response.
The other thing is for local government to be represented, along with many other entities of the State and civil society in the central government. This would mean, for example, that all the mayors would be automatically members of the national Senate. If the principle of direct election were applied to local government too, Robin Montano wouldn't even have to run for a seat on the corporation. He could run for mayor of San Fernando, and end up in Parliament anyway, without allegiance to Panday as the price he had to pay to get there.
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon