[EM] World election

[Doug Woodard]

Problems I forsee:

1. Not enough commonality of political culture.

2. Inadequate communications/media/reporting. Didn't Thomas Jefferson say
something to the effect that he would prefer a free press with no
democracy to a democracy with no free press?

3. Re Josef Stalin's remark

"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide
everything":

Who would guarantee honest elections? The crooked regimes would not
tolerate an honest election regime in their countries.

It seems to me that honest electionms require that the entity guaranteeing
the honesty of the election be sovereign (or politcally congruent with an
honest sovereign entity) - unacceptable in a large part of the world.

Ultimately we will need some kind of loose world government. I think the
right route is by gradual coalescence around a tolerably free, honest,
democratic and multicultural/multilingual soveriegn political entity -
i.e. a development of the European Union.

We will also need the United Nations meantime - one hopes improved, but
the concept of a forum of sovereign states has weaknesses in this world.
We will need not to have too high expectations of it.

Doug Woodard
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada


On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Stephane Rouillon wrote:

> It is slightly off topic but I am interested in hearing comments about this...
> Could we put in place a world electoral system for a world parliament?
> How to make it acceptable beyond one person one vote compared to the
> actual difference of powers between countries?