Voting

In English class, we read a book called The Poisonwood Bible.

In the book, there were two instances of voting. One in which the Congolese vote on whether they should believe in Jesus or their native gods, and one in which they vote on whether or not Leah should be allowed to participate in a hunt. The controversy in the second issue was that Leah is a woman, and women don't hunt, according to Congolese tradition.

In the case of the Jesus vote, Jesus lost by a wide margin. Of the Prices, only Ruth May had the guts to vote, and likely only because she wasn't fully aware of the significance of the vote, being a young child. Ruth May voted for Jesus, but this is only because she was the daughter of a preacher who had been stuffing Jesus down her throat since she was an infant. As far as we know, Ruth May was the only one who voted on blind faith (well, maybe blind-er faith).

This vote was interesting because all the villagers had their own opinions, and voted on them. If we had to correlate this with the American political system, the villagers would basically be independents, and Ruth May would really be the only one playing party politics. This is a stark contrast from the American politics, which is highly partisan. Compared to the huge margin of something on the order of five times more votes for native gods than Jesus, the recent midterm election vote, as with most votes in the United States, had a relatively small margin. Even among the independents, who don't associate themselves with specific parties, there was a relatively small margin between votes for Republicans and Democrats.

The difference in the magnitudes by which the winning party won in both votes could be attributed to party politics and to the complicated nature of United States politics. Perhaps more to the core of the issue though is that the United States runs on a representative democracy, or a republic, and the villagers actually had a democratic vote, where the villagers expressed their will on a particular issue. The fact that the margin of victory in US elections is small could be due to the nature of our political system; we're not always sure what we're getting when we vote for a particular person or party, and thus there is much confusion when it comes to voting, especially when partisan media is thrown into the mix. If we were to simply have democratic votes on every single issue, I predict that we would get a lot more decisive results. However, due to the time that would be consumed in this process and how informed the voters would have to be in order to make a meaningful vote, this is simply not feasible.

In the hunting vote, Leah won the right to go on the hunt. Leah won by a smaller margin than did the native deities. Perhaps this was because this was because a woman hunting was a change from the norm. Perhaps this was a reflection of some of the issues in the US system, since partisanship began to develop in the village, with schoolteacher Anatole leading one party and the tribe leader leading the other party.

So yeah. Partisanship leads to split votes. Partisanship is perhaps unavoidable in a representative democracy. And due to the nature of party politics, dynamic action and change is unlikely. Here's to the next two years.