This guest column was written by Mike Gasser, who is on the faculty of the School of Informatics at Indiana University. You can reach him at mikegasser @ sbcglobal . net.
The idea of representative democracy is that citizens choose a set of people based on their qualifications and political views to govern on the citizens' behalf. This very popular idea has been adopted all over the world. But the idea conflicts with political reality in one important way. Power and wealth are distributed unevenly in all societies, and those with the power and the wealth are usually unwilling to give it up. So the process is sometimes manipulated to give an advantage to candidates who will favor the rich and powerful. We've all heard about the blatantly undemocratic interference that happens in elections around the world: arrests of opposition leaders, restrictions on who can run for office, and ballot-box stuffing.
A particularly loathsome tactic is vote buying, a straightforward way for the rich to maintain their control of the government. In the United States, vote buying is supposed to be illegal, but we have a legal and well-accepted variant of it. In our country, voters learn most of what they know about a candidate (unless that person happens to be famous already) in costly "campaigns." For an election campaign, the candidate's image may be carefully crafted by experts from the same industry that convinces us to buy particular brands of cars or cosmetics. In such a system, the voters' impression of a candidate clearly depends on how much money the candidate has access to. Indeed, who even gets to be a candidate in the first place is determined largely by money or fame.
Say I'm a rich person who wants to influence an election in one of the primitive democracies where vote buying happens. I pay an employee to go out among the voters and give each of them money to vote for the candidate I trust to favor the rich. In our more advanced democracy, it's easier; I can give the money directly to my candidate, who then uses it to buy time on the media and pay advertising experts to write clever campaign ads and speeches.
Here's an example. Our 9th District Congressman, Mike Sodrel, is running for re-election this year. Sodrel is not a particularly rich or famous man but, fortunately for him, George W. Bush took time off from his job as president of the United States on March 24 to fly out to Indianapolis on Air Force One to gather together a group of supporters for Sodrel. These people, about 500 of them, paid $1,000 a plate to have lunch with President Bush, and the proceeds went to Sodrel's campaign.
I don't know about you, but I find it troubling that the 500 people attending that lunch in Indianapolis should be able to buy votes in our district. Of course it's not just Republicans who use this approach to winning elections. It's the way elections work in the United States.
What can we do? I'd suggest a few things. First, we can promote town meetings as a way for citizens to inform themselves about candidates. Second, we can learn about candidates from a source that all of them have relatively cheap access to, the Internet. Four of the candidates in the upcoming Congressional 9th District primary election (two Democrats and two Republicans) have Web sites, where they tell you about their qualifications and positions on issues. If you don't have a computer, you can use the computers in the Monroe County Public Library for free.
Finally, we can favor the rare candidates who really want to change the whole system of election campaigns in the U.S.; piecemeal campaign finance "reform" has gotten us nowhere.
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