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Open Ballot System (OBS) is a type of electoral mandate conducted in the open, with the result counted and tallied in the open. No second-guessing, no secret permutations, no late-night chicanery, no last-minute skulduggery, no missing ballot boxes, no unknowns. Transparency to the letter, democracy at its best, motherhood and apple pie, who on earth can possibly disagree? Argument for “open primaries”, by extension, OBS, has been raging within the various political parties in this country for some time, most especially, within the two major parties in the last couple of years; the Peoples Democratic Party and the All Progressives Congress. If all can be done so easily in the open, with the outcome openly arrived at, then, what are we waiting for? What is blocking this el-dorado; this glorious nirvana? As seductive as this reasoning goes in favour of entrenching democracy, it has many major flaws. This week’s column is designed to shed light on the debate and, in the process, proffer a way forward rather than sit on the fence. This is not an academic exercise; it is the burning issue of our time.
Let me say, first of all, that this type of debate is the stuff of democratic politics. It takes place all the time even in the most advanced democracies in the world. Remember the last election in the USA, which the current President, Donald Trump, won? He did so against the backdrop of having lost the popular vote by more than three million votes, in fact. There is no such thing as direct voting in the US presidential elections, voting is weighted for each state through an electoral college. It so happens that some states carry bigger weight than others depending on population and aggregate economic clout within the federation. The electorate vote to secure as many delegates in the Electoral College as possible for, it is the delegates count that determines who becomes President. On the contrary, in Nigeria, we have what is known as “direct franchise”, that is to say, your vote as an elector, goes directly to the candidate of your choice, not routed via any college. The debate in America, now, is for a change in the electoral system to direct franchise to prevent a repeat of what happened in the 2016 Presidential election. As it goes, it is only a debate, not yet an agitation so, good luck to them over there.
Our preoccupation on this side of the Atlantic, however, is for the oft repeated, but less understood “internal democracy” within the political parties. At the moment, candidates are chosen by party activists in the wards and constituencies. Thereafter, the chosen ones become their party’s “torchbearers” in the electoral contest against opponents from the other parties. This is simple and fair enough, you might say. The problem is, those party activists have, over time, become pawns on the chessboard of candidates for office. They can now be bought and sold like pieces of meat in the market. Candidates no longer advance manifestoes and political programmes; they look to generate enough funds to put in the highest bid for the individual votes of party activists. An open, direct primary, it is thought, would open up the voting and selection of candidates to every card-carrying member of the political party, making it difficult if not impossible to initiate vote-buying and late-night hustling. Brilliant?
The problem with the kind of open primary just described is that it is in fact, anti-democratic. Party activists are the ones sufficiently placed to assess the worth of candidates in their immediate vicinity. They understand, more than anyone else, the direction of the party, its ideology and direction. They are the ones who have worked tirelessly to uphold the party structure at the local level. They are thus, best placed to distinguish the wheat from the chaff. Furthermore, open primary is an invitation to demagoguery. What invariably happens is that selection is thrown open to card-carrying members who have neither had the time nor interest in scrutinising candidates at close quarters. What they see on these occasions is no more than a beauty parade of individuals vying for votes, and in an environment of high illiteracy, the best candidates may end up being submerged and the country at large suffers the consequences later on from having an incompetent leader foisted on it.
The solution, in my view, is for us, in Africa, to institute both the open primary and open ballot systems into our local electoral laws. The two are mutually inclusive of each other, as one merely reinforces the other. The main rationale for an open primary is the widening of democratic participation, while open ballot enhances transparency and direct accountability by doing away with the age-long secrecy of the ballot. I am acutely aware that this would alarm our Western financiers, who regard secret ballot as sacrosanct. There is nothing particularly noble about it in modern day democratic process. International diplomacy used to be conducted in secret by the same Western governments as well. It was abandoned because it led in large part to the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918). Nobody knew what accords had been entered into by which country or countries. It created suspicion and paranoia, which then fuelled all sorts of conspiracy theories about the imminent intention of states towards each other. The lesson of that is the open diplomacy in world affairs that has endured to this day.
What secrecy does in our own terrain, in Africa, first, is to allow moneybags politicians to roam freely, shopping for votes. Secrecy also offers the easiest avenue for ballot manipulation of all kinds. The period, that is, the hiatus between voting and counting is what presents us with an intractable headache in Africa. The OBS does away with that in one fell swoop. Instead of dropping off your ballot in a box, walking off and hoping it counts, you simply queue behind your preferred candidate openly, in broad day light. Your choice of candidate is registered there and then, with no quibbles. People would still be able to queue up behind the candidate who has promised them money after the exercise. Yes, but whoever agrees to be paid in such a manner is taking a risk that he would actually get the money. After all, the vote would have already been secured. Furthermore, paying thousands, perhaps, millions of voters in an open ballot system would be a logistical nightmare for whoever is intent on doing so. It is also uneconomical to commit to such outlandish amount of money to give away. It is a major disincentive. How about the dreaded voter intimidation with such an open system? Well, granted there may well be pockets of threats and intimidation in the early stages, but people will wise up to the idea over time. The onus is on the people to defend their ballot. How about organising queues for dozens of candidates at a time? Well, the answer to that is only the three leading candidates in an area gets separate queues. There is another queue marked ‘others’.
The list of what if, what about this, what about that is as lengthy as the size of this write up, I must admit. That is quite normal with any innovative idea. The proof of the pudding must be in the eating, however. The OBS is not an original idea from this column, it has once served us well in this country. This piece is an argument in its favour; to reinforce the spirit and thought behind the concept. It is also to drive home the point that for us in Africa, it is an idea whose time has come.
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