Suffrage

Elections are somewhat new to our modern cosmopolitan society. Elections arose after the development of political parties in the 18^th and 19^th century when democracies after the French Revolution happened. Now in days elections are held all around the world in a massive way although no every country is democratic, yet that is the primary goal of a government to achieve that political state and have balance with its people.

Why are elections so in vogue? Part of the answer is that “democracy” is a synonym of respectability. Even states that are not democratic wish to appear democratic, and holding elections is one of the easiest ways to follow some of the forms of democracy. One example of an autocratic state in which elections figured importantly is the Soviet Union before 1989. A second reason is that elections allow a huge mass of people to select their leaders and policies.

While we do not normally think of elections in democracies as functioning to build support for the system, it can be shown that elections serve this purpose as much in democracies as in autocracies. In 1968 before and after the elections American voters were asked if they felt that by voting they were involved in the government surprisingly they said they did not care, but after a massive electoral campaign in 1972 Americans claimed that they felt happy with the government and that they felt included by voting.

Many elections are based on the principle of "one person, one vote", meaning that every voter's votes are counted with equal weight. This is not true of all elections, however. Corporate elections, for instance, usually weight votes according to the amount of stock each voter holds in the company, changing the mechanism to "one share, one vote." Votes can also be weighted unequally for other reasons, such as increasing the voting weight of higher-ranked members of an organization.

Single-member district plurality voting (SMDP) is the system most commonly used for legislative elections in the United States. It is the one most people think of when they think of the word "voting." In Great Britain and Canada, this system is often called "first-past-the-post”. How It Works. In this system, all the candidates appear on the ballot and the voters indicate their choice of one of them--by marking an X, etc.

 Vote

All the votes are then counted and the winner is the one with the most votes. Winners need not collect a majority of the votes, only more votes than their opponents do--a plurality of the votes. So if candidate A receives 40% of the vote, candidate B receives 35%, and candidate C gets 25% -- candidate A wins the seat.

It is evident that not all of those who are capable to vote do vote. In 2000 American presidential election, for instance, only 50 percent of those who were eligible to vote did so. In Great Britain 71% voted, Czech Republic 76%, Germany 82%, Sweden 81%. European democracies usually exhibit higher levels of electoral participation than the USA.

Suffrage is a constitutional right we all have. By the means of elections is how political leaders and political parties approach the common people. Elections are another way to unify a country to get involved in its governmental duties. Not all governments are democracies like the Canada, Sweden, Norway, or Finland yet the suffrage is a way to unify its people. The reason why countries that don’t have a democracy have elections is because it’s a synonym of respectability and all governments want to appear as so, plus it gives somewhat level of social control.

A sketch of what voting looked like before