Democracy is trickier than I thought; lessons from Kosovo to the North Pole

I’ve been thinking a lot about voting recently. On 12 December I spent the day in polling stations around Pristina municipality as an election watcher. It was a long day and as good as watching a play. It was life and also death (the names on the electoral roll who had long passed away), hate (the look on the faces of some voters as they shoved their ballot paper into the box made it clear that there were scores being settled) and love (the long-married couples shuffling into the voting booth together, and resisting being parted by polling station officials protesting about family voting and the secrecy of the ballot). But overall, I saw it as a day of hope. Every person who bothered to get off their sofa and out into the chill to mark a sheet and put it in the box was expressing some kind of hope; for change, for power, for influence, for the triumph of justice, for victory – the basic human instinct that makes you want your guy to win. The faces passed before the observers’ table like a succession of portraits, and I thought I saw a dream in every one.

We left the polling station groggily at 1am when finally the count had been reconciled, 20 hours after we had first entered to watch the box being declared empty and ceremonially sealed. Already, at 1am, some reports were coming in of electoral irregularity – the ballot stuffing, voter payment, spoiling of opposition ballot papers, multiple voting. 12 December had passed; it felt like the day of hope was over.

I turned my attention to other countries, newer pastures – virgin lands. I have always wanted to travel to the North Pole, and I’ve never been able to afford it, but a few days after Kosovo’s elections I saw a competition offering a place for an official blogger to accompany a trip to the North Pole. To qualify, you had to write a piece about a journey you’d taken, showing how you would be suited to the role of blogger. The winner would be decided by votes received.

I posted a short piece at www.blogyourwaytothenorthpole.com/entries/159, started my own small electoral campaign through Facebook and Twitter, and waited for votes to come in. It was my own taste of running for election victory – I even had friends who posted the link as their Facebook status for me, like the best election agents do.

Some people voted – in their tens and twenties, though not more. Those from Kosovo couldn’t help but see the parallels with the rather more significant poll they had just been through. Posted comments included ‘I just voted but do me a favour, if you lose because not enough people do the same, don’t blame it on election fraud’ and ‘Come on Skenderaj, let’s see a 101% turnout for this’. One friend wrote that he had voted with all three of his email addresses – but then removed his comment, presumably thinking of the Central Electoral Commission in Pristina and their recent judgements.

I could take this kind of cynicism, but the next stage in my journey out of democratic naivety came when I started researching the other contestants who were doing better than me. One entrant had received 1943 votes and I wondered what his secret was. Googling his unique entry link showed at least one of the ways he had done it, because it took me to a site called getonlinevotes.com. I found the woman currently running second in my blogging competition there too, along with people entering photography competitions, Beach DJ contests, New Year’s Eve outfit contests and cooking competitions. They were vote swapping and, when their listing had run out, paying to be relisted. Was this democracy?

But then my friends on Facebook had voted for me, and some of their friends had done so too – people I didn’t know, just because they wanted to do me, or our mutual friends a favour. That’s how society, and social networks work. No money changed hands of course, but there was no doubt some distant sense of favours being traded, a delicate patronage system being set up between us. If one of them were to contact me in the future asking me to ‘Like’ a group they’d set up, I might now take the trouble to do it – just to be friendly, to show gratitude.

And when the local party organizer comes to your house and suggests you might want to turn up to vote for them on election day, you might do it – irrespective of the party’s policies (what party policies?). If the local party organizer comes to your house and offers to pay off your tab at the local minimarket, and then suggests you might want to vote on election day, you might still do it.

So did I pay my subscription to the site to get votes for my travel blog entry? No. Do I think it is the healthy way forward for Kosovo’s political system to be fuelled by money so that votes go to the highest bidder? No. But can I fully unravel the unspoken obligations which might cause someone to vote in a certain way, in an online contest or in a desperately important national election, irrespective of the quality of what they are voting for? No.

And tomorrow I will go to the polling stations in the municipalities where the Central Electoral Commission has determined that December’s elections were irregular. And I will watch like a hawk, like a double-headed eagle. But I don’t think I’ll be able to see anything going on at all.

Elizabeth Gowing is a travel writer who has lived in Kosovo for the past 4 years.

Follow Elizabeth on Twitter:@elizabethgowing.