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Look Who’s Going to Teach Armenia About Voting

By Markar Melkonian

NEWS ITEM - “The U.S. Embassy in Yerevan announced this week that the United States, along with the European Union and the governments of the United Kingdom and Germany, will provide financial support for a new voting process in Armenia.  The new processes are meant to decrease electoral fraud.  According to a message posted on the U.S. Embassy’s Facebook page, American envoys will help “strengthen trust in the Armenian electoral process via same-day voter authentication and the publication of signed voter lists after the elections.”  (Foreign Policy Magazine, Nov. 29. 2016) 

And this, less that one week after tens of thousands of Americans in half a dozen cities demonstrated against the results of the November presidential election in the United States, delivering the message “not my president.” 

It seems many American voters themselves do not trust the American electoral process.  And there are reasons for this.  In the most recent presidential election, candidate Hilary Clinton received two million more votes than the person who won the election.  If the system were majority-rule or one-person-one-vote, she would have won the election by 1.5%.  But she lost. 

This is not the first time in recent years that American democracy has defeated the will of the majority of voters in that country.  In the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore, the candidate of the Democratic Party, received half a million more popular votes than his opponent, George W. Bush.  The score was Gore:  48.4%, Bush:  47.9%.  Like Donald Trump, George W. Bush won the election thanks to America’s Electoral College system.

Like the other “checks and balances” that Americans are so proud of, the Electoral College is an enduring legacy of America’s “peculiar institution,” slavery:  it was designed to ensure a balance of political representation between northern bankers and manufacturers on the one hand and the slaveholding planter class in the South.  (George c. Edwards, “Five Myths about the Electoral College,” Washington Post, 2 Nov. 2012, or read Chapter 5 of Howard Zinn’s wonderful book, A People’s History of the United States.)

The late Dr. Fidel Castro once described the nomination process of the presidential candidate for the Republican Party of the United States as “the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been."  But the former president of Cuba wrote this in 2012!  (The Guardian, Jan. 25, 2012)  Many self-styled experts scoffed at his judgment of American politics four years ago.  It would be interesting to hear what they have to say now. 

Trump Claims the System is Rigged and Permits Massive Fraud

Americans are famous for limiting discussions of democracy to the mechanics of periodic electioneering.  We have just witnessed how very edifying American electioneering can be.  So, let us follow the lead of our Yankee tutors and limit this discussion to voting processes and electoral systems.  (For a discussion of more fundamental questions about democracy, refer to:  Hetq.am, “What Could Democracy Be?” Pts. I-III, 4 April, 5 May, and 1 June, 2015.)

In the run-up to the recent American presidential election, one of the candidates repeatedly asserted that the electoral system of that country is ‘rigged.’  On September 27, that candidate, Donald J. Trump, claimed in a series of Twitter posts that his opponent had received her two-million-plus-vote advantage thanks to illegal voters.  According to Trump, then, the American electoral system is so flawed, so prone to fraud, that it accepted more than two million fraudulent ballots.  In less than two months, Trump will be the boss of the staff at the U.S. Embassy.  This is the peculiar context within which that embassy has announced that it will provide support for a new voting process in Armenia to fight voter fraud.   

Yes, of course Trump’s accusations are wild, unsubstantiated, and untrue.  But the very fact that he can get away with this nonsense—the very fact that his supporters appear to accept his accusations of massive fraud without much at all in the way of discernible objections—shows that many American citizens do not trust the very electoral system that America’s envoys hold up as an example for countries like Armenia to emulate.

Those Famous Double Standards

If envoys from the Big Embassy succeed in teaching the benighted natives how the American electoral process works, then those natives will have a better understanding of American democracy than most Americans themselves have.  A 2011 study by the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute found that only 57% OF THOSE WHO HAVE HELD ELECTED OFFICE in the United States knew what the Electoral College does.  This raises the question why the envoys don’t stay in their own country and direct their efforts to their compatriots, if they are truly interested in spreading the good news about voting processes. 

In the wake of large demonstrations protesting the contested results of the 2000 presidential election in the state of Florida, the late, internationally revered—and, yes, ELECTED--President of the Republic of Cuba offered to send Cuban advisors, to help make the electoral system more democratic.  One can already hear the spring-loaded response of some of our ostentatiously “non-ideological” readers:  What?!  But Fidel Castro was a dictator!  (Or, as Donald Trump would elaborate, “a brutal dictator.”)  He was a one-man ruler in a one-party state with uncontested elections, in which the opposition has no chance of winning!  

The most vocal critics of Cuban democracy do not apply their own evaluative standards to the U.S. political system.  More moderate observers have described the USA, too, as a one-party system because the two nominally distinct parties that monopolize elections are both parties of Big Business, with the same ideology of American Exceptionalism.   (See, for instance, Pearl Korn, “Are We Now a One-Party System?” The Huffington Post, 9 July, 2012; Elias Isquith, “Chomsky:  America Has Become a One-Party Rogue State,” Salon.com, 6 Nov. 2013.)  And when it comes to the possibility of a genuine opposition candidate winning an election in the United States, we might consult Bernie Sanders and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein about the chances of that.   (On the other hand, it should be pointed out that opposition candidates do occasionally win elections in Cuba.  The last time this writer was in Havana, two Fundamentalist Protestant Christians held elected seats in the National Assembly of People’s Power, the supreme legislative body.)  

If the United States of America is a democracy, then so is the Republic of Cuba. 

Not the Right Envoys

Officials in the United States did not accept Dr. Castro’s offer to support a new voting process in Florida.  But it seems they expect people in countries like Armenia to welcome American meddling. 

The American envoys, we learn, “will provide financial support for a new voting process in Armenia.”  One wonders whether they will provide Armenia with the same electronic voting machines that so many millions of American citizens distrust.  (Online key words:  “presidential election recount.”) 

Among other things, the envoys are supposed to help with same-day voting.  Let us note that most states in the USA itself still have not approved same-day voting provisions.  

And then there is the partial rescinding of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a federal law that was suppose to prohibit racial discrimination in voting, but was never fully enforced in many parts of the USA, and is now in danger of disappearing entirely.  (“Supreme Court Invalidates Key Parts of Voting Rights Act,” New York Times, 26 June 2013.) 

Not to mention the question of campaign financing and the fact that the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court of the United States has unceremoniously torpedoed years of talk about campaign finance reform.  (Online keywords: “Citizens United decision.”)  And to round out our appreciation of the American voting system, readers are invited to check the online keywords “poll tax.” 

When it comes to exporting democracy, America’s record is atrocious.  Americans have a long and well-documented record of overthrowing democratically elected leaders.  Readers who doubt that Uncle Sam has destroyed more democracies than he has supported are welcome to consult William Blum’s book, Killing Hope, or Noam Chomsky’s book, Deterring Democracy, for a rundown of the scores of democracies and democratic leaders that the USA has replaced with tyrannies since 1945.  

In view of America’s poor record of fair elections on the domestic scene and its history of destroying democracies abroad, why would officialdom in Yerevan welcome their advice?  This, after all, is a country that seems to believe that fair elections can take place in Afghanistan, Iraq, El Salvador, Colombia, and a dozen other countries, in the middle of civil wars and under foreign military occupation.  It is also a country that--as the late and venerated Cuban leader, once again, has pointed out--arrogates to itself the monstrously undemocratic right to impose thermonuclear war on other countries. 

Yes, voter fraud is a big problem in the Republic of Armenia, a problem that should not be trivialized.  So are the electoral code, campaign financing, and equal access to the media, among other problems.  But FOR THAT VERY REASON, one would expect officials who are genuinely concerned about fair elections to seek help where it is likely to be forthcoming.  One good place to begin might be to consult with election officials from countries with good records of fair elections.  Perhaps our election officials should seek the advice of their counterparts in Sweden or India. 

But then we know that the Big Embassy’s announcement is not really about improving Armenia’s electoral system. 

We know that it is just another propaganda stunt, a tit-for-tat against Moscow, another lesson in obedience for the instruction of the natives. Yankees like to pretend that the whole world is lined up to adore them. 

And there are people in Yerevan, both in the current administration and in the opposition, who are more than willing to jump through every hoop that American envoys wave in front of their noses.   

Markar Melkonian is a teacher and an author. His books include Richard Rorty’s Politics:  Liberalism at the End of the American Century (1999), Marxism: A Post-Cold War Primer (Westview Press, 1996), and My Brother’s Road (2005). 

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