The dictionary defines Democracy as, “a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.” The ‘eligible’ ones maintain democracy through voting. Voting plays a big role in Democracy.
I recently watched a documentary called Suppressed: The Fight To Vote by Robert Greenwald which made me think does democracy really exists in this country? Marcia Fudge, the Chair of Elections Subcommittee, US House of the Representative says, “This is systematic if you look at what has happened across this country in the last five years. 40 States have passed some kind of law to make it more difficult for people to vote.” In Randolph county, they were trying to close voting polls. 62% of Randolph county is African American. In Lincoln Park, polling place shut down in 2016. 95% of Lincoln Park is African American. Louis Brooks in the interview says, “It made me feel like they were closing down to keep the black people from voting”.
Kemp in Georgia, withheld putting the names of thousands on the voter registration list until after the election. 80 percent were African Americans, Latinos and, Asain Americans.
President and CEO of Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Vanita Gupta says, “there has been instance after instance of unlawful voter purging. States are removing voters, many of whom have actually been found to have been eligible but were unlawfully removed from the rolls.”
Chair of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology, Rich Demillo, says, “An easy way to suppress the vote is to just make that resource unavailable and that’s exactly what happened in the 2018 election here in the state of Georgia. In places like North Fulton County which are wealthy, there were more machines than anyone could ever use. In black neighborhoods, there were quarter number of machines that were needed to service the population.”
Nepal being in-between communist China and democratic India, takes pride in being the world’s only democratically elected communist government. Both countries overlook Nepal’s politics and help fund campaigns for their respective parties they want to “rule” Nepal to furthermore strengthen and outshine their influence than the other. Almost all of the politicians are war-criminals who have killed hundreds of people during the long-lasting civil war in Nepal.
Nepal’s constitution states that citizenship by descent through mother is allowed but when I went to make mine, it was impossible and had to go through verbal-assaults from the government workers and such hassles. It was only made possible only after my “step-father” came into the picture. There are so many cases like mine where Nepal does not follow its own constitution. Impunity is so prevalent in my country that people have come to accept it as normal. A journalist who challenges the government disappearing is a common case.
The Nepali Communist Party has an almost two-thirds majority in Parliament and dominates the nation. The legislature is merely a dysfunctional puppet to the powerful government. Aditya Adhikari, the author of a history of the Maoists says, “as soon as one entity comes in and has massive power, then, of course, they are going to start imposing restrictions, because liberal norms have not been institutionalized in Nepal, ever.”
Even though Nepal’s case is a harsher slap to the promises of democracy than it is of the US, what Kemp did isn’t as far as what Nepalese parties do to win the election. Kemp won in Georgia against Abrams, his opponent, an African American in 2018.
Basically, if people in power are able to exploit their powers over the weak, who are the “people” of their country, “Democracy for the people and of the people” can be a hoax.
Journalism 2.0 