Design Alternatives to the Ballot Box Voting System

Abstract

Introduction Western democracy has always been an idea dependent on the design of physical systems that enable citizen participation in decision-making. Athenian citizens of the fifth century BCE helped implement Kleisthenes’s new system of governance by dropping tokens indicating either “for” or “against” into amphorae, which could be emptied and their contents counted publicly to ascertain the majority’s decision.1 That original design still persists in most democracies today, where the most noticeable physical difference is that paper ballots and lockable boxes replace tokens and jars. A more significant system difference is that public balloting today is used primarily for the election of governmental representatives and the political parties to which they belong. This party political (or “representative”) system of democracy is often called the “Westminster” system, after the customs and practices of British parliaments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In marked contrast, the original Athenian democracy was a “direct” one, in which all major policies were decided by a popular ballot, rather than a restricted ballot within the boule (i.e., the standing council of 500 regional representatives, and the forerunner of present-day congresses). Moreover, members of the boule and the legislature were not voted into office. They were citizens selected by lot, using an ingeniously designed lottery device, carved from stone and called a kleroterion.2 Thus, any notion that the Westminster system had revived the principles and values of Athenian democracy was a fanciful conceit of British parliamentarians, who had only really created a system for deciding which of their various factions could take a fixed period turn at governing the nation. As British Lord Chancellor Quintin Hogg suggested in 1976, their Westminster system might better be described as an “elective dictatorship,”3 in which citizens play no role other than to decide which individual should represent their locality inside an institution that Dickens characterized as “the best club in London.”4 Only its members can decide what legislation they wish to consider and implement, how they 1 Aristotle, Constitution of Athens and Related Texts, trans. Kurt von Fritz and Ernst Kapp (New York: Hafner, 1974), 145-47. 2 Sterling Dow, Aristotle, the Kleroteria, and the Courts, in “Athenian Democracy,” ed. P. J. Rhodes (Oxford University Press, 2004), 62-95. 3 Quintin Hogg, Elective Dictatorship, Richard Dimbleby Lecture, October 14, 1976, BBC TV. 4 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1998 [1865]), 234.