Monday, November 18, 2024

Here and There

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
—The late American journalist and satirist P.J. O’Rourke
One day. It was literally from one day to the next that we finally got past U.S. Election Day 2024 on the 5th of November—only to have the date of Ireland’s general election confirmed on the 6th. The campaigning here officially began two days later when a government minister signed an order to hold the election once the taoiseach (prime minister) visited the home of the Irish president to ask him to dissolve the Dáil (lower house of parliament). The election will be held on the 29th.

That seems mercifully brief when compared to the marathon Squid Game that is the American electoral process. In reality, in Ireland as in the U.S. the campaigning for the next election never really stops. The difference is that in the U.S. the date of the next general election and all future elections are known years, decades and, theoretically, centuries in advance, as presidential and congressional terms are fixed by the constitution. Under the parliamentary system in Ireland (also typical of most other countries), taoisigh (that’s the plural of taoiseach) have wide discretion to call elections—as long as it happens within a five-year window following a new Dáil’s first meeting. So, nobody knows for sure when the next election will be until a few weeks before.

Given how the American electoral process itself has become a campaign issue in recent times, it’s interesting to compare and contrast how things work here as opposed to there. For one thing, virtually all voting in Ireland will take place on a single day. There is no early voting, and everyone will vote in person. Except for a few specific circumstances voting by mail is not allowed. In the recent U.S. election, I voted in the state of Washington by downloading and printing a ballot and then mailing it to the county elections office in the U.S. By contrast, Irish citizens living abroad (like my daughter) simply do not get to vote unless they happen to be back home for a visit. And yes, Irish polling places do require voters to show identification.

After the polls close in Ireland, ballots are all counted by hand. This means it can takes days for the final results to be known, although it has to be said the poll workers are impressively efficient under the circumstances. Of course, hand-counting works better in a small country than it would in a massive one like the U.S. Interestingly, Ireland did try using electronic voting machines (manufactured in the Netherlands) on a trial basis back in 2002, but it proved controversial. It was leftist parties with the loudest concerns, mainly over the lack of an audit mechanism or paper trail. An independent commission was established to study the matter, and it ultimately recommended against the machines. The nail in the coffin came when a group of Dutch hackers demonstrated how easily they could infiltrate and change the electronic tallies.

In the end, the 7,000 machines purchased by the government for €54.6 million (including €3 million euro of charges for storing them for five years) were scrapped—much to the government’s embarrassment

As far as I know, Ireland has never attempted postal voting, but another country where I once lived used to have it. Mail-in voting was allowed in France from 1958 to 1975 at which point it was banned because of instances of fraud. These days proxy (i.e. absentee) voting is allowed in France for those with a legitimate reason as to why they cannot vote in person, and more recently internet voting has been introduced for citizens living abroad.

One reason that Irish ballots take so long to count is because of the country’s complicated voting system. It is called “proportional representation with a single transferable vote” (PR-STV). Some states in the U.S. are trying out this system, calling it ranked-choice voting (RCV). Several have employed it for local elections, and some (Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and the District of Columbia) have used it or plan to use it for federal and statewide elections.

Meanwhile, several other states have passed or attempted to pass laws banning RCV. The argument against it is that it is overly complicated and confusing for voters.

There is definitely a learning curve to this way of voting, but the Irish seemed to have embraced PR-STV and are quite happy with it. The main advantage is that it eliminates the need for runoff rounds. You are essentially voting in the first and second rounds—and possibly even more—all at the same time.

Voters rank their first-choice candidate as No. 1 and then, optionally, any other candidates on the ballot as 2, 3, etc. (This is why Irish election posters don’t just ask for your vote; they ask for your No. 1 preference.) Ballots are counted and, if no candidate’s first preferences have exceeded 50 percent, then ballots are re-counted as many as necessary, each time removing the lowest vote-getter and distributing his or her votes according to their preferences for No. 2, No. 3, etc. This continues until someone exceeds 50 percent—or until all preferences are exhausted, at which point the highest vote-getter is declared the winner.

This definitely seems to result in a better reflection of the voters’ wishes than the British method. The UK uses a system called single member plurality or, more commonly, first-past-the-post. A single round of voting is held, and whoever gets the most votes—even if it is not a majority—wins. In a country with three major political parties, this results in some skewed results. For example, in the British general election held in July, the Labour Party received 33.7 percent of the nationwide vote yet was rewarded with 63.2 percent of the seats in Parliament, making the party’s leader Keir Starmer the Prime Minister.

Ireland’s system seems more representative than that, but it is prone its own strange results. In the 2020 general election, the party with the most votes was Sinn Féin (erstwhile political arm of the Provisional Irish Republican Army) with 24.5 percent of the first-preference votes. Because Sinn Féin had no prospect of forming a coalition to achieve a working majority, the government was instead formed by longtime political enemies Fianna Fáil (22.2 percent) and Fine Gael (20.9 percent) along with the Green Party (7.1 percent). In turn, that resulted in two rotating taoisigh during the government’s term, meaning that at no point was there a government leader whose party had received more than 22.2 percent of voters’ first preferences.

I bear all of the above in mind whenever Irish or British people insist to me that the U.S.’s Electoral College is a crazy way to pick a nation’s leader.

Monday, November 11, 2024

Non-consecutive

 Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, “You really don’t have so much to worry about.” He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: “You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”
 He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
—Tom Wolfe, “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1976
Here’s me raising my head out of my bunker, blinking in the daylight, and asking, “Is the election over yet?”

Asking that right now in Ireland amounts to a mean trick. No sooner are we finally past the interminable season of American electoral politics, but an election is called here in the republic. Mercifully, the campaigning here lasts a mere three weeks, and the votes will be cast by the end of the month. Not that politicians and pundits haven’t been angling for years—or that the media have not been publishing regular polling outcomes—with an eye on the next electoral go-round, but law and custom restricts Irish politics from doing much overt politicking and campaigning outside of these few weeks. That just feels civilized.

There are many contrasts and comparisons to be made between U.S. elections and European ones generally (and Irish ones specifically), and I expect to do that one of these days, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, what to say about the American result? Clearly, the public’s emotional and intellectual reactions are every bit as polarized as their debating and pontificating were during the long campaign. Nothing feels settled. As with every election, one side now has the ascendancy, and the other has serious processing to do about what went wrong and how to go forward. That’s even more true than usual this time around, as the result was pretty darn decisive, belying how narrowly divided we kept being told the voters’ intentions were.

Out of curiosity, I went back and re-read what I wrote at this point eight years ago, the first time Donald Trump was elected. What stood out was the sense of utter surprise. I suppose that marks some kind of progress that this time around, while journalists were unable (nor should they have been able) to tell us who would win, the public were not misled about what to expect as much as they were eight years ago. That doesn’t mean some of the public reactions in social and other media haven’t been every bit as extreme as that other time, nobody seems to have been blindsided by anything other than their own heartfelt hopes.

Back then, I observed that Republicans benefited electorally from a nomination process that enabled an unruly, messy, sometimes angry grassroots. Democrats had a more top-down process that made the eventual nominee seem inevitable from the beginning. Of course, that would have been normal enough this time, given that the party had an incumbent president determined to be reelected. Circumstances, however, resulted instead in a nominee that did not participate in a single primary in the 2024 cycle. The miracle is, given that situation, that Kamala Harris did as well as she did.

Should I feel prescient that I also pointed out that the Republican field of primary candidates back then actually seemed more diverse than the Democratic one? Yes, America has once again missed its chance for its first female president (and one of color), but I just heard someone on ABC News point out that this time one out of three people “of color” (whatever that means exactly) voted for Trump. Democrats did themselves no favors presuming that certain demographic groups owed them their votes.

In my eight-year-old post, I also offered what I called “a silver lining” to those fearing an impending dark cloud of a Trump presidency. I probably should have foreseen that it would only annoy those it was meant to comfort, but I feel vindicated.

“If you believe that there is way too much money in politics and that deep pockets are determinative,” I wrote, “then you should take comfort that the candidate who set an all-time record for the most money collected and spent lost and that the candidate who set a new benchmark for low campaign spending won.”

Democrats used to talk about campaign finance reform all the time. Not so much anymore. Now they are the party of big political money. Their presidential candidate outspent the winner by three to one, yet lost the popular tally by more than 3 million votes. No matter how you feel about that result, you have to take encouragement from this proof that money is not necessarily determinative in elections.

By contrast, my tongue-in-cheek suggestion that people determined to escape their Trump nightmare by emigrating might be happier in Canada than in Europe may not have aged as well. Eight years later, Justin Trudeau is still Canada’s prime minister but may not be much longer. A BBC piece last week reported he’s under intense pressure to step down, as his Liberals have been trailing the Conservatives in polling by a wide margin for months. It compared his troubles to those of Vice-President Harris in terms of a majority population feeling their country is moving in the wrong direction.

So, is Europe a better destination? Well, that’s a long story. As I said, stay tuned.