• South Africa’s election results present 3 options for government: all are fraught with danger

    South Africa’s election results present 3 options for government: all are fraught with danger

    Philippe Burger, University of the Free State

    South Africans do not have a deep culture of coalitions. There have been a few coalitions at provincial and municipal levels but most of these were quite unstable.

    The outcome of the 2024 national election up-ended 30 years of electoral dominance by the African National Congress. The party garnered only 40.18% of the vote while the Democratic Alliance got 21.81%, the uMkhonto weSizwe Party 14.58% and the Economic Freedom Fighters 9.52%.

    That means that the country will need to learn to dance the coalition dance, a dance that under the best of conditions is fraught with partners stepping on each other’s toes.

    And all of this happens in an economy that is not in good shape. South Africa has an economy with negative per capita growth, high and rising unemployment, poverty and inequality, a government deeply in debt, and 26 million people – 42% of the population – on grants.

    One possible outcome from ongoing talks is that the African National Congress partners with the radical Economic Freedom Fighters led by Julius Malema and with former president Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party. After 30 years of promises of a better life for all, millions of people feel excluded, left in poverty, with little means to take care of themselves. Zuma and Malema have shown that they know how to capitalise on this sense of exclusion.

    The second option is that the ANC partners with the biggest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance.

    Lastly, it could opt to run a minority government.

    All three options are fraught with difficulties and dangers.

    Disillusionment on the part of former ANC members who joined the Economic Freedom Fighters and uMkhonto weSizwe makes coalition formation with the political left quite difficult. And should it succeed, the economic consequences would likely be quite negative. The Economic Freedom Fighters and the uMkhonto weSizwe Party are not business-friendly parties. A coalition with them would likely result in the alienation of investors, a further drop in economic growth and consequently a lack of job creation.

    On the political right, coalition formation between the ANC and the Democratic Alliance would be no less difficult, especially given their significant philosophical differences about the role of government and on how to overcome economic and social challenges. Even if they were to succeed in cobbling together a coalition, it would cause serious instability.

    Such instability would not be conducive for investment. Investors would prefer to stand on the sidelines and observe how such coalitions shaped up.

    The third option, of running a minority government, presents another set of challenges – in particular the prospect of a very unstable government in a permanent state of gridlock. (Examples of minority governments can be found in Canada and a number of European countries.)

    The possible partners

    A coalition between the ANC and the Economic Freedom Fighters or uMkhonto weSizwe is not as straightforward as it might look.

    Founded a decade ago, the Economic Freedom Fighters has represented alienated, excluded youth, who feel the deal struck in 1994 doesn’t benefit them.

    Malema was brilliant in mobilising large numbers of young people. Although his vote in this election waned somewhat, he still, broadly speaking, represents a cohort of younger people disillusioned with ANC policy. And these voters will not necessarily like a coalition with the very same ANC unless it brings them a demonstrable benefit. Anything less will cost the Economic Freedom Fighters support in future elections.

    In the case of Zuma, it is a little more complex. To understand his influence, we need to understand the man and the role he played in KwaZulu-Natal over almost 40 years. In the early 1990s, before the first democratic elections, he played a key role in pacifying the bloody conflict between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the ANC. And, from very humble, rural beginnings, via the anti-apartheid struggle and prison, he made it to deputy president of both the party and the country. And then President Thabo Mbeki axed him as deputy president of the country following his implication in a corruption scandal.

    But Zuma fought back. And once back, this time as president of the party and the country, he mobilised KwaZulu-Natal in support of the ANC. He remains hugely popular in the province, as the recent election results show. The uMkhonto weSizwe Party garnered 45.9% of the vote.

    His lifetime achievement was inspirational to many, because, if a man from such humble beginnings could become president, then anything was possible for everyone.

    As in the case of the Economic Freedom Fighters, it would not be so easy for the ANC to go into a coalition with uMkhonto weSizwe. They represent groups of people seriously aggrieved by the ANC. They are angry and disgruntled. If the ANC wants a coalition with these parties, it will have to offer them something that addresses their anger and disgruntlement.

    But doing that would probably result in rising government expenditure and debt levels. And if that coalition had to raise taxes to deliver on all the promises it made, investors would be likely to run away.

    Given the leftist, statist views of both the Economic Freedom Fighters and uMkhonto weSizwe, we might also see more interventionism, regulations and unwise political support to state-owned entities.

    South Africans have recently seen the private sector assisting the government in resolving the electricity, transport and harbour infrastructure bottlenecks. That would probably all come to nothing with this type of coalition.

    Financial markets would probably not look favourably on a coalition with populists.

    A coalition between the ANC and the Economic Freedom Fighters or uMkhonto weSizwe would likely be an economic disaster. Either the ANC delivers on all the promises such a coalition will entail, which will be fiscally unaffordable and economically counterproductive, or if they try to contain the fiscal cost, and therefore not deliver on their promises, the coalition will fall apart and introduce further instability.

    However, there are some clear heads in the ANC who would not like to go down this path.

    The Democratic Alliance

    A coalition with the Democratic Alliance could take two forms. One is a real coalition with the ANC and the Democratic Alliance, and possibly other smaller parties like the Inkatha Freedom Party, sharing cabinet positions.

    However, for a party like the Democratic Alliance this would hold the serious danger that if things were to go badly over the next five years, it would be seen as complicit and lose votes in the next election.

    Should the Democratic Alliance nevertheless enter such a coalition, government’s economic policy would pivot slightly more pro-market and possibly include a greater focus on frugality and efficiency in government.

    But it would be difficult and time consuming to carry out these sorts of measures with a reluctant senior partner. The resulting frustration on the part of the Democratic Alliance would then likely cause the end of the coalition.

    Such a coalition would be inherently unstable because the parties are philosophically quite far apart. Foreign policy in just one example.

    The second form of coalition between the ANC and Democratic Alliance entails the ANC running the executive branch of government and the Democratic Alliance running parliament – the so-called “supply and confidence” model. Thus, the ANC leader would be president and appoint the cabinet with ANC appointees, and the Democratic Alliance might appoint the speaker or deputy speaker, and chairs of parliamentary committees. It would presumably also include an agreement that the Democratic Alliance would support the budget and not introduce a no-confidence vote in the ANC-aligned president.

    The ANC would have to negotiate support for each piece of legislation it brought to parliament. This would result in very little being passed.

    Without an agreement to support the budget and confidence in the president, the ANC would have little incentive to support such a coalition and might prefer to form a minority government.

    Going it alone

    A minority government would be very unstable as getting anything through parliament would be almost impossible.

    If the annual budget isn’t passed, spending becomes unauthorised – a messy situation politically and economically.

    None of the options on hand would be easy. South Africans need to hang on to their seats. It’s going to be a rocky five years.

    This is an edited version of a talk delivered at a webinar hosted by the University of Free State Centre for Gender and African Studies and Institute of Race Relations on 5 June 2024. The opinions expressed in this op-ed represent those of the author and not necessarily those of the institution.The Conversation

    Philippe Burger, Dean: Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, and Professor of Economics, University of the Free State

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

  • Election: Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi Seen Prevailing

    Myanmar voters braved long lines Sunday and were expected to return Aung San Suu Kyi and her ruling National League for Democracy party to power in a country racked with civil war and struggling with a surge in the coronavirus pandemic.

    Polling before the vote indicated Myanmar’s voters will give the former political prisoner and Nobel laureate a second five-year term, after she won office in 2015 on a platform of establishing civilian government after five decades of harsh military rule and ending long and costly wars with armed ethnic groups.

    https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/enthusiastic-vote-11082020195540.html

  • Congress could select the president in a disputed election

    If the House of Representatives selects the president, each state would get a single vote – not one vote per House member.
    iStock/Getty

    Donald Brand, College of the Holy Cross

    President Donald Trump’s campaign is challenging results of battleground states with lawsuits, hoping to litigate its way to a win in the 2020 election. But the Founding Fathers meant for Congress – not the courts – to be the backup plan if the Electoral College result was disputed or did not produce a winner.

    Generally, the framers sought to avoid congressional involvement in presidential elections. As I’ve taught for two decades in my college course on presidential selection, they wanted an independent executive who could resist ill-considered legislation and would not care about currying favor with members of Congress.

    That’s why they created the Electoral College, assigning to state legislatures the responsibility for choosing “electors” who would then determine the president.

    But the framers could foresee circumstances – namely, a fragmented race between little-known politicians – where no presidential candidate would secure an Electoral College majority. Reluctantly, they assigned the House of Representatives the responsibility to step in if that happened – presumably because as the institution closest to the people, it could bestow some democratic legitimacy on a contingent election.

    Tied or contested election

    The founders proved prescient: The elections of 1800 and 1824 did not produce winners in the Electoral College and were decided by the House. Thomas Jefferson was chosen in 1800 and John Quincy Adams in 1824.

    Over time, the development of a two-party system with national nominating conventions – which allows parties to broker coalitions and unite behind a single presidential candidate – has basically ensured that the Electoral College produces a winner. Though the Electoral College has changed significantly since the 18th century, it has mostly kept Congress out of presidential selection.

    A tie in the Electoral College is one way the 2020 election could end up with Congress. In the extremely unlikely scenario that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump get 269 electors, the election would be thrown into the House.

    A more likely scenario is that the Trump campaign’s litigation winds up getting Congress involved in the 2020 election.

    Though courts will decide specific questions of legal interpretation in voting disputes, they do not want to be perceived as deciding the 2020 election result, as the Supreme Court did in 2000. Where possible, judges will decline to hear lawsuits that ask big political questions and leave these issues for the political system to resolve.

    Enter Congress. If neither candidate gets to 270 electors due to disputed ballots, the House would have to decide the election.

    Though the House has a Democratic majority, such an outcome would almost certainly benefit Trump. Here’s why: In a concession to small states concerned their voices would be marginalized if the House was called upon to choose the president, the founders gave only one vote to each state. House delegations from each state meet to decide how to cast their single vote.

    That voting procedure gives equal representation to California – population 40 million – and Wyoming, population 600,000.

    This arrangement favors Republicans. The GOP has dominated the House delegations of 26 states since 2018 – exactly the number required to reach a majority under the rules of House presidential selection. But it’s not the current House that would decide a contested 2020 election; it is the newly elected House, and many Nov. 3 congressional races remain undecided. So far, though, Republicans have retained control of the 26 congressional delegations they currently hold, and Democrats have lost control of two states, Minnesota and Iowa.

    Evenly divided delegations count as abstentions, and Republican gains in Minnesota and Iowa are moving these states from Democratic to abstentions.

    https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/speaker-of-the-house-nancy-pelosi-d-calif-left-and-rep-news-photo/1228708868?adppopup=true
    House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi is reportedly preparing for the possibility that presidential selection ends up in the House.
    Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

    Congressional commission

    Perhaps the most relevant precedent for a contested 2020 election that winds up in the House is the 1876 election between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. That election saw disputed returns in four states – Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana and Oregon – with a total of 20 electoral votes.

    Excluding those 20 disputed electors, Tilden had 184 pledged electors of the 185 needed for victory in the Electoral College; Hayes had 165. Tilden was clearly the front-runner – but Hayes would win if all the contested votes went for him.

    Because of a post-Civil War rule allowing Congress – read, Northern Republicans worried about Black voter suppression – to dispute the vote count in Southern states and bypass local courts, Congress established a commission to resolve the disputed 1876 returns.

    As Michael Holt writes in his examination of the 1876 election, the 15-member commission had five House representatives, five senators and five Supreme Court justices. Fourteen of the commissioners had identifiable partisan leanings: seven Democrats and seven Republicans. The 15th member was a justice known for his impartiality.

    Hope of a nonpartisan outcome was dashed when the one impartial commissioner resigned and was replaced by a Republican judge. The commission voted along party lines to give all 20 disputed electors to Hayes.

    To prevent the Democratic-dominated Senate from derailing Hayes’ single-vote triumph over Tilden by refusing to confirm its decision, Republicans were forced to make a deal: Abandon Reconstruction, their policy of Black political and economic inclusion in the post-Civil War South. This paved the way for Jim Crow segregation.

    Bush v. Gore

    The 2000 election is the only modern precedent for contested vote returns.

    George W. Bush and Al Gore argued for a month over Bush’s slim, 327-vote advantage in Florida’s second machine recount. After a lawsuit in state courts, this political and legal battle was decided by the Supreme Court in December 2000, in Bush v. Gore.

    Protesters hold pro-Bush signs while police do crowd control, with Supreme Court in the background
    The scene outside the Supreme Court, Dec. 11, 2000.
    Shawn Thew/AFP via Getty Images

    But Bush v. Gore was never intended to set a precedent. In it, the justices explicitly stated “our consideration is limited to the present circumstances.” Indeed, the court could have concluded that the issues presented were political, not legal, and declined to hear the case.

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    In that case, the House would have decided the 2000 election. The Electoral College must cast its ballots on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December. This year, that’s Dec. 14. If disputed state vote totals are not resolved by six days prior to that date, Congress can step in, under the 1887 Electoral Count Act.

    This could have happened in 2000, and it is imaginable this year.

    This is an updated version of an article originally published Oct. 9, 2020.The Conversation

    Donald Brand, Professor, College of the Holy Cross

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

  • How votes are counted in Pennsylvania: Changing numbers are a sign of transparency, not fraud, during an ongoing process

    Election officials counting ballots at the Allegheny County elections warehouse Friday in Pittsburgh.
    Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

    Kristin Kanthak, University of Pittsburgh

    Last week I was grading an online exam for my students. We’re working with a new learning management system at my university and I didn’t realize my students could actually see their grades moving up and down online as I was working on their tests.

    It was a mistake. Not knowing how the numbers were changing, what judgments were behind the changes, and when they’d just get to know the outcome made them frantic.

    And as election officials work through the final vote tallies of the 2020 election, I imagine Americans feel similarly.

    A lot of transparency with very little context is more nerve-wracking than it is helpful. This is true for exam grades as well as elections. My students can drop by my office hours if they want to understand how I graded their exams. And I hope this explainer will provide a similar context to the way we count votes in the United States.

    A lone Trump supporter facing a crowd of Biden supporters outside the ballot counting location in Philadelphia.
    A Donald Trump supporter faces a crowd of Joe Biden supporters outside the central ballot counting location in Philadelphia on Thursday.
    Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via Getty Images

    From grading exams to counting votes

    When my students were watching me grade, they might have seen their score rising very slowly. This would make them think they were doing very poorly on the exam, because they were not getting very many points per question.

    But it could be that I was just grading the most difficult questions first. Later on, when I started grading easier questions, their grades would go up fast.

    Counting votes is like grading runs of easy or hard questions.
    This year, Democrats were far more likely to mail in their ballots. Pennsylvania counts in-person ballots first, and rural areas are faster counters than urban areas. So Trump voters got the scores on the easiest questions early. If you were a Republican watching the vote count in Pennsylvania, early election returns made you feel like you were doing pretty well on the exam.

    But once the urban mail-in vote started coming in, that changed. Philadelphia mail-in ballots were like a long run of tough questions. Trump’s score started declining fast.

    Importantly, though, this doesn’t mean the system is “rigged.” Actually, it means the system is transparent to a fault. Usually when you take a test, you don’t see the grading happen in real time. You just get the score when the grading is done.

    The key takeaway is that it doesn’t matter which questions get graded first and it doesn’t matter which votes get counted first. The end result is the same. It is just that having to watch it happen can play with your emotions.

    Ballot security

    Cheating on an exam is far easier than cheating in voting. Let’s go through the process to see how it works.

    Step 1 (optional): Mail in your ballot

    Many voters were skeptical of mailing their ballots this year, but those fears were likely mostly unfounded. Put simply, it is hard to steal your mail-in ballot. Election mail does not get thrown in with supermarket coupons. Rather, there is a special system just for mail-in ballots. And like most states, Pennsylvania uses the Intelligent Mail Barcode system for ballots, a system that works like a Postal Service tracking number.

    A Trump campaign poll watcher films the counting of ballots at the Allegheny County elections warehouse
    A Trump campaign poll watcher films the counting of ballots at the Allegheny County elections warehouse Friday in Pittsburgh.
    Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

    Although voters themselves rarely see this tracking system, it is available to local canvassing boards, and the Postal Service is required to provide updates on the progression of election mail through the system. In fact, it was this system that alerted interest groups to a set of 300,000 potentially missing ballots – ballots whose bar codes showed them arriving at a post office, but not leaving one.

    The Postal Service assured a judge that the ballots had been safely delivered. And voters in most states, as in Pennsylvania, could check online to be sure their ballot was delivered and cast a provisional ballot if it had not. Questionable ballots are held aside, and county boards of election have seven days to determine whether the vote should count.

    Step 2: Verify eligibility

    When you vote in person, you sign for a ballot and possibly show some identification.

    This year, President Trump encouraged his supporters to vote twice – something he said later that he did as a joke. This is bad advice. It is illegal in all states and can generally get you jail time. Potentially, you could lose your right to vote in future elections.

    In fact, one of the reasons the votes in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, took so long to count was to avoid the potential for unintentional double-voting due to an error there in ballot printing.

    Importantly, poll observers – campaign volunteers who are looking out for their candidate’s best interests – are watching every vote as it’s processed. This is true even in Philadelphia, where Trump campaign officials sued because they claimed they were kept “in darkness” at the polling place. They defined that “darkness” as 20, rather than 6, feet away from the canvassers tasked with counting the ballots. Trump’s observers sued and won their 14 extra feet, but at no time were ballots being opened in secret.

    Poll watchers attached to the campaigns can call out problems with a ballot. If signatures do not match, for example, a campaign’s poll watcher can challenge the ballot.

    The ballot will then undergo additional scrutiny. The canvassers then make a decision about whether or not they will accept the ballot in question, and explain their decision to the poll watchers. At this point, if one of the poll watchers disagrees with the ruling the canvasser makes, he or she can make a note of the details of the ballot, including the name of the voter and the reason the vote may be incorrectly counted.

    Campaigns can use these lists when they are drawing up lawsuits if they think the canvassers were counting ballots that ought to have been rejected, or rejecting ballots that ought to have been counted.

    Step 3: Count the ballots

    This part is straightforward. But it can take a long time because secretaries of state want exact numbers. In 2016 we knew Trump won Pennsylvania by around 44,300 votes. But the results weren’t official until officials were sure the exact number was 44,292.

    Step 4 (optional): Count the ballots again

    Most states have provisions for automatic recounts if the vote is very close. That margin is usually 1% or less of total turnout. In Pennsylvania, the threshold is 0.05% of the vote. That’s really close, but given that turnout in Pennsylvania exceeded 6.6 million this year, that could be more than 33,000 votes. A recount usually isn’t likely to find enough votes to change the outcome.

    All this is to say, watching votes get counted is like watching an exam get graded. It seems like a process that is changing over time, but it is not. The votes are already there. They will be counted. If there is fraud, it will be found. That’s why there are lawsuits.

    It just may take a while, and it may be hard on your nerves in the meantime. Maybe it is best to look away until they have finished the job.

    [The Conversation’s Politics + Society editors pick need-to-know stories. Sign up for Politics Weekly.]The Conversation

    Kristin Kanthak, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.