The button-pressers of Verkhovna Rada would likely be curious enough to learn that the first automated voting system for a legislative body was invented by none other than the great Thomas Edison.
He did it back in 1869.
Having learned that the city council of Washington and New York state legislators had started investigating possibilities for making vote counting and recording procedures more user-friendly, Edison designed a switch that the legislator could re-set from “yes” to “no” position and vice versa, sending the corresponding signal to the central recorder that sorted the legislators’ names into two columns.
Edison himself recalled how he was arguing all the advantages of his project before a legislator after the invention’s demonstration in Congress, only to see the politician becoming utterly terrified of it.
“Young man,” he shouted at Edison, “we have no use whatsoever for it! This is exactly what we do NOT want. Your invention will completely destroy the minority’s influence on lawmaking, weak as it is already. It will have them bound hand and foot and subordinated to the majority’s will!”
Hmm ... Tell it to the Ukrainian opposition now, almost 150 years on.
Not surprisingly, the Americans did not switch over to an automated vote counting system until 1970. Nearly 50 bills providing for automated, mechanized, electrical and electronic voting systems could not muster the required number of human votes in Congress, given without buttons and switches.
Strangely, though, the Americans are shocked at the pictures of free-for-all in our Verkhovna Rada and rejoice that their Republicans and Democrats have not yet turned to hitting each other’s faces and breaking the parliamentary equipment, as our legislators do.
It would be more reasonable for them to be happy with our opposition’s resistance to the infernal machine that their countryman invented.
This is so because all of us here, on this side of the Atlantic, are confident that if the voting in Verkhovna Rada was held by a show of hands, standing up, shouting, clapping, or any other normal mammalian way of expressing opinions, then Ukrainian democracy would have all its issues sorted out long ago.
Give a Ukrainian politician the button, on the other hand, and they will find a newspaper to cover themselves when engaging in illegal ghost-voting for an absent neighbor.
They may not bother with covering at all, of course.
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Enforcing the principle “one MP, one vote” is currently the most important task of the Ukrainian opposition. Everything else, absolutely everything, depends on this principle. While MPs are still “playing piano” on multiple buttons, all of them, including the opposition, are to blame for our troubles.
They are, not us.
The government’s majority is guilty of distorting our will, while the opposition’s fault is its inability to get the majority to stop by rapping their knuckles, or their faces. When MPs will start passing stupid laws by personal vote only, we finally will have no grounds for complaining and declaring that we did not vote for those rascals. The honest voting will create a comfortable social and political equilibrium which can exist only when the entire nation admits responsibility for its mistakes. One’s own mistakes are always easier and faster to fix than those of other people.
A new election is one such fix, while a pitchfork-armed mob is another one.
The opposition is right to demand criminalization of ghost-voting in Verkhovna Rada, but only to an extent that such a criminal law would make us equal with our representatives and democratize our relationship with them. I am very grateful to them for this initiative, because as the things stand now, a common voter may be jailed for ghost-voting, while an MP runs no such risk.
Beyond that, the criminalization bill will change nothing, even if it miraculously becomes a law. How is one to prove that the MP intended to touch the neighbor’s button while the culprit claims “an honest mistake”? Where to look for their mens rea? Is it in their head or in their pocket?
Any system, involving technology or not, will suit us, if it makes ghost-voting physically impossible. We do not need a new law for it, though.
We need just the will to fight for the new voting procedure.
The opposition should not waste its resources trying to advance other initiatives, because decision-making on them will be inevitably distorted by the current ugly voting customs. They should not forget that the current tide is raising their boats, because common citizens, social movements and NGOs are tolerating ghost-voting no more. The MPs who cover themselves with newspapers when engaging in it and even blush when caught red-handed signify great progress. This initiative should be carried through, even if it means delays in voting on urgent bills.
Preventing Verkhovna Rada from functioning for any reason other than to end ghost-voting will only discredit the opposition. Standing outside the fence around the parliament building on Hrushevskoho Street, we are better equipped to see what objects are relatively more important. We can see clearly that putting an end to distorting our will is the most important one.
If the MPs so addicted to the buttons, they should be provided with touch buttons.
The alternative is complete abolition of button-based voting system.
Edison’s invention terrified the American lawmakers of the time because it depersonalized the voting procedure.
It terrifies the modern Ukrainians because of this simple technology’s propensity to be shamelessly abused.
The abuse is well past time to be stopped.
