Suffrage
Elections are
somewhat new to our modern cosmopolitan society. Elections arose after the
development of political parties in the 18th and 19th 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
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