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How India’s massive 2019 election will work
- adictator 8y agoThe world's largest democracy & arguably the best. Almost anything that India does, even marginally successfully, is done at a scale that is incomparable to anything in the world.
- clhodapp 8y agoThe second claim seems dubious. China has about the same number of people as India and about twice the land area. The US has about the same area as China. Russia has twice that land area.
- bobthepanda 8y agoMost of the Chinese people live in about half the land area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihe%E2%80%93Tengchong_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihe%E2%80%93Tengchong_Line That being said, only China is willing to do things like build high speed rail lines to Urumqi and Lhasa that won't even cover the electricity costs of running the trains.
- l24ztj 8y agoIf you forget China that is.
- r00fus 8y agoNoone is forgetting China. In the context of democratic elections, adictator's comment still has merit.
- clhodapp 8y agoI think adictator's first point has merit, especially because it is couched as something that is arguably true. The problem is the generalization-stated-as-fact that the second point tries to make: there are all kinds of things (e.g. building transit networks and power grids) that other countries do that are definitely on a comparable scale to India's efforts.
- neya 8y agoI'm not genuinely not trolling, but is China really a democracy? I have been to China and I think it's far from being a democracy.
- l24ztj 8y agoHe said "almost anything that India does is at an impressive scale". Nowhere he talked about elections. Also elections in India are pretty much rigged especially because of people buying votes.
- dugluak 8y agoChina is not a democracy. It's a communist country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
- tracer4201 8y agoBy what metric are they the best democracy? I visited Hyderabad and Chennai for work in 2018 for about three weeks. It’s certainly not a place I would want my family with me. The food in Hyderabad was amazing though, I’ll give them that.
- parthdesai 8y agoWhile i'm not well versed in politics and democracies around the world, i have seen a common person protest against the government, get over whelming public support, start his own party and go on to become the chief minister of Delhi all within a span of 5-7 years. I know for sure that isn't possible in the US.
- rayiner 8y agoBill Clinton was a common person. While he didn't start his own political party, he radically changed the Democratic party into a more conservative form, and got himself elected President.
- throwaway123156 8y agoWas Bill Clinton appreciably more conservative than Jimmy Carter, the last Dem President before Clinton?
- rayiner 8y agoVery much so. Clinton trimmed the welfare rolls, cut the number of federal employees, deregulated finance, deregulated telecom (though Carter was also a major deregulator, having deregulated airlines, trucking, and beer), signed NAFTA, signed DADT, signed DOMA, signed RFRA, passed aggressive violent crime legislation, etc.
- calvinbhai 8y agoAre you sure you are not conflating the meaning of the word "democracy" to different issues, including quality of life, climate, infrastructure etc? There's no way you can evaluate how good/bad democracy is in any country, in 3 weeks.
- ousta 8y agohave you been there? deep poverty as soon as you jump in a train, massive open defecation, legal system that is tribal and still rely on caste, very low women rights especially for non-educated ones. but yeah they might be doing better than anyone for sure.
- calvinbhai 8y agoDemocracy, is not about any of these issues you are pointing at. India may have a long way to go in aspects you have mentioned, but the way the Indian democracy works, it has enough checks and balances to make it work as intended, which IMO is among the best if not the best. PS: I have worked at booth level before, during and after the elections in India, to know the intricacies of what happens during the whole process.
- tiuPapa 8y agoDude have you been here? Legal system that is tribal? Deep poverty as soon as you jump in a train? I am not saying India is perfect but this is an exaggeration and undermines the steps India has taken in the past one or two decades in a positive direction
- ousta 8y agohttps://idsn.org/report-finds-entrenched-caste-discrimination-in-indias-criminal-justice-system/ https://idsn.org/report-finds-entrenched-caste-discriminatio... This is not an exageration anyone jumping in the train from their biggest cities will know. https://www.ritimo.org/Slum-Settlements-on-Railway-Land-A-State-of-Denial-and-Deprivation https://www.ritimo.org/Slum-Settlements-on-Railway-Land-A-St... not saying that progress has not been made. But calling India the best democracy is not factual worse it's a blatant lie. It is a country where you can (should) bribe public officials i.e: "A study conducted by Transparency International in 2005 recorded that more than 62% of Indians had at some point or another paid a bribe to a public official to get a job done"
- tiuPapa 8y agoSo like American Police's discrimination against people of color? I am from India, in India. You have only read about it, I live in it. Not saying the slums around railway lines are not there but the condition also has improved a lot. 2005? That's more than a decade back.
- yarapavan 8y agoMore details on the logistics behind the Indian election - With a population of 1.3 billion people and a voting age of 18, an astonishing 900 million Indians are eligible to vote. This is nearly double the entire population of the 28-country European Union, and triple that of the United States. Often, the electorate of a single state in India is as large as that of a country. The ECI deploys over 11 million civilian and security personnel — greater than the population of 42 of the 50 states in the US— to ensure the elections run fairly and smoothly. Source: https://medium.com/@sarveshmathi/logistics-behind-the-worlds-largest-election-7a944b76aa4f https://medium.com/@sarveshmathi/logistics-behind-the-worlds...
- MeltySmelty 8y agoA country operated by corruption and you think a smoke a mirror show means elections are fair? Priceless!
- pradn 8y agoThe mechanics of the actual election seem to be decent enough. But there is rampant vote buying in many areas. I've personally seen liquor handed out for votes. Money, clothing, and alcohol are commonly used to purchase votes in many rural areas. Last I heard, it cost something like like 1000-3000 RS ($15-40) per head in rural Andhra Pradesh. FT article from 2014: https://www.ft.com/content/a9d35821-f2f1-3479-8082-2ce1e6fa79cf https://www.ft.com/content/a9d35821-f2f1-3479-8082-2ce1e6fa7...
- jngreenlee 8y agoFor compare, articles say $2.4BN USD spent in 2016 Presidential Election, with 137.5MM voting. That's $17.45 per capita. But I don't know if I'd swing a vote for a single bottle of wine!
- satya71 8y agoIndian voters don't swing their vote for the money. They know it's a secret ballot, pocket the money, and tell the buyer they voted for them.
- MuffinFlavored 8y agoWhat are the chances election campaigns become a thing of the past? I know zero about politics but... why don't citizens get presented a list of what each candidate supports, where there is overlap between candidates, and where there is disagreement? Why do candidates need to "spread the message" and "go on tour" and "win people over" when we as citizens are supposed to, at the root, be voting on what policies they believe in (which seems concrete + fact, instead of something like leaving a wooing/lasting impression with a speech/appearance)
- rayiner 8y ago> Why do candidates need to "spread the message" and "go on tour" and "win people over" when we as citizens are supposed to, at the root, be voting on what policies they believe in (which seems concrete + fact, instead of something like leaving a wooing/lasting impression with a speech/appearance) That assumes that citizens are supposed to be voting on policies. In our representative democracy, we vote on the people we want, not policies. The specific policies will be unrecognizable after they get through the process of political compromise. What people are really voting for is the person whose hand they want on the wheel.
- harichinnan 8y agoThis is a puff piece to legitimize use of EVMs. India uses EVMs, a closed source device made by a secretive Japanese manufacturer. The government claims the device is "hack" proof. They stubbornly refuse to conduct an open hackathon to find vulnerabilities.
- Arnt 8y agoIAUI the major threats historically were booth takeovers, stolen vote forms and bribed vote counters, and from what I've head the machine has a good record on defeating all three. Is that correct, or have there been developments I've missed?
- pushtheenvelope 8y agoyou are correct. The EVMs have definitely helped in this regard. That said, threat models keep evolving. As EVMs are now used, one needs to incorporate EVM manipulation in the threat model as well. The way to stay ahead of these threat models is to have an open, transparent process. A simple way to do that is to publish the design spec of the EVMs, and any source code. Invite audit from the world. Hiding it away is just "security by obscurity", which is well-known in the security community as not being good practice.
- _jgdh 8y ago> well-known in the security community as not being good practice The folks in charge of making decisions don't understand security. I'm not criticising them, it's quite reasonable that a layman would think that security by obscurity works.
- pushtheenvelope 8y agoyep, agreed! I wish that was not the case, though, and its up to us as the tech community to educate our policymakers.
- Arnt 8y ago
- sremani 8y agoThe real heros are Indian Election Workers and security personnel who travel to towns and villages far away from their homes and set up the elections and many times sleep on the floors of schools and offices to conduct these elections. India could never be authoritarian for one simple reason its too damn diverse, a country that is contradictory to every definition of nation state exists because it has adopted democracy how ever imperfectly and mastered elections.
- satya71 8y agoI am not sure about it can never be authoritarian. It went through an emergency situation, because the ruling part lost the election at the time. The current govt is whipping up mass hysteria, and might just succeed, based on what I see happening on the ground.
- portpecos 8y agoThis is true. Congress leader, Indira Gandhi, suspended Indian democracy and assumed the titled of dictator for few years when she lost an election. She also jailed many people including many political leaders that are still active today. Her son engaged in forced sterilizations and another son brought in a bill to kill the press called "defamation bill". We need to recognize that’s it’s not just the right that can go authoritarian, but the left too. Authoritarianism isn’t a symptom of far-leaning political views but a failure in systems of checks and balances. Xi Jinping is a perfect example of a current failure of system of checks and balances when he removed term limits. Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is another example of a failure of system of checks and balances. Saddam Hussein was a failure of system of checks and balances too.
- _jgdh 8y ago> India could never be authoritarian Don't get complacent. The man in power has never lost an election, so I don't know if he knows how to lose with grace. What's more, he has very authoritarian tendencies, like intimidating the press[1]. [1] - https://thewire.in/media/punya-prasun-bajpai-abp-news-narendra-modi https://thewire.in/media/punya-prasun-bajpai-abp-news-narend...
- osrec 8y ago"Better" is difficult to measure. I used to think that US elections are a lot less corrupt than Indian elections, thus are probably "better". Now I'm not so sure! The sheer scale of an Indian election is rather remarkable though, as is the melodramatic buzz it generates throughout the country. It's an administrative marvel, especially when you consider the strangling bureaucracy that is rife in most Indian government departments.
- cies 8y ago> I used to think that US elections are a lot less corrupt than Indian elections, thus are probably "better". Now I'm not so sure! I've read some thing about the primaries in the last US election, especially in the dems party. Wow, that was corruption to a whole new level. Also these primaries are (by design) super important to the US elections; too important to be so "unregulated" if you ask me.
- misthop 8y agoWhat corruption do you think you see?
- stronglikedan 8y agoI have a feeling that you may be being disingenuous, based on the wording of your question, but the one of the most glaringly obvious examples was Bernie getting pushed out by his own party.
- DFHippie 8y agoOy. If nothing else, Bernie is an independent. The Democrats are not his party. They are his natural allies, or should be, and he understood U.S. elections well enough to know that if he ran as a third-party independent he and the Democrats would both lose, electing their natural antagonist: whichever Republican. So, in sum, Bernie ran in the Democratic primary to be the Democratic candidate, but he was not and is not a Democrat.
- 8y ago
- edoo 8y agoI turned down a job to create a rigged voting system in an African 'republic'. It was for something regional, not the majors. They wanted the voting system to have two lights outside the voting center, one for each candidate, where the brightness of the light indicated the number of votes for each, with the ability for remotely overriding and setting the brightness for each light. That was an eye opener.
- spectramax 8y agoI recently watched an independent film called “Newton” [1] about Indian democracy and voting process. It was amazing and I highly recommend it. [1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt6484982/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt6484982/
- calvinbhai 8y agothis movie is well made, and is available on Amazon Prime (in the US.)
- gvand 8y agoBut what about the candidates?! Try to top those and then we'll talk.
- kobiguru 8y agoThe system is in place. Things change slowly in a democracy that has its flaws as well as benefits. Faults of a slow democracy are easy to see but benefits are not so much. You see move fast break things is not how you deal with people's life. The system is in place and it has immense constitution powers granted. Once the literacy increases so would the quality of candidates. If you look at ADR databases and compare it with regional GDP as well as educational levels you would see a clear trend towards a net positive. The slop isn't as high as we would like it but it's positive and that's how democracies work.
- gfosco 8y agoWell yeah, they have Voter ID.
- portpecos 8y agoI think voter ID is important. Even Hostels and Hotels require a state ID to book a hotel room.
- efitz 8y agoWhy is the election "better" if more people participate? If the additional people aren't well informed, then they're subject to all sorts of corruption (as mentioned in numerous other sibling comments) as well as to demagoguery.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]