"In a small town, the chief of police, who was also the veterinarian, was awakened from sleep by a frantic telephone call.'Please come quick!' said the woman on the line.'Do you need the police or a vet?' he asked.'Both,' answered the woman. 'We can’t pry our dog’s mouth open, and there’s a burglar’s leg in it.'”"One of the allegations of Election Fraud in the 2024 elections in Indonesia is the use of 'Pork Barrel Politics.' Before continuing with this concept, let me mention the Declaration on Criteria for Free and Fair Elections adopted by the Inter-Parliamentary Council, which Indonesia is one of its members.In any State, the authority of the government can only derive from the will of the people as expressed in genuine, free, and fair elections held at regular intervals based on universal, equal, and secret suffrage.The Declaration mentions the rights and responsibilities of States. That (1) States should take the necessary legislative steps and other measures, by their constitutional processes, to guarantee the rights and institutional framework for periodic and genuine, free, and fair elections, by their obligations under international law. In particular, States should: Establish an effective, impartial, and non-discriminatory procedure for the registration of voters; Establish clear criteria for the registration of voters, such as age, citizenship, and residence, and ensure that such provisions are applied without distinction of any kind; Provide for the formation and free functioning of political parties, possibly regulate the funding of political parties and electoral campaigns, ensure the separation of party and State, and establish the conditions for competition in legislative elections on an equitable basis; Initiate or facilitate national programs of civic education, to ensure that the population are familiar with election procedures and issues;(2) In addition, States should take the necessary policy and institutional steps to ensure the progressive achievement and consolidation of democratic goals, including through the establishment of a neutral, impartial, or balanced mechanism for the management of elections. In so doing, they should, among other matters: Ensure that those responsible for the various aspects of the election are trained and act impartially, and that coherent voting procedures are established and made known to the voting public; Ensure the registration of voters, updating of electoral rolls and balloting procedures, with the assistance of national and international observers as appropriate; Encourage parties, candidates and the media to accept and adopt a Code of Conduct to govern the election campaign and the polling period; Ensure the integrity of the ballot through appropriate measures to prevent multiple voting or voting by those not entitled to it; Ensure the integrity of the process for counting votes.(3) States shall respect and ensure the human rights of all individuals within their territory and subject to their jurisdiction. In time of elections, the State and its organs should therefore ensure: That freedom of movement, assembly, association, and expression are respected, particularly in the context of political rallies and meetings; and That parties and candidates are free to communicate their views to the electorate, and that they enjoy equality of access to State and public-service media; That the necessary steps are taken to guarantee non-partisan coverage in State and public-service media.(4) In order that elections shall be fair, States should take the necessary measures to ensure that parties and candidates enjoy reasonable opportunities to present their electoral platform.(5) States should take all necessary and appropriate measures to ensure that the principle of the secret ballot is respected, and that voters are able to cast their ballots freely, without fear or intimidation.(6) Furthermore, State authorities should ensure that the ballot is conducted so as to avoid fraud or other illegality, that the security and the integrity of the process is maintained, and that ballot counting is undertaken by trained personnel, subject to monitoring and/or impartial verification.(7) States should take all necessary and appropriate measures to ensure the transparency of the entire electoral process including, for example, through the presence of party agents and duly accredited observers.(8) States should take the necessary measures to ensure that parties, candidates and supporters enjoy equal security, and that State authorities take the necessary steps to prevent electoral violence.(9) States should ensure that violations of human rights and complaints relating to the electoral process are determined promptly within the timeframe of the electoral process and effectively by an independent and impartial authority, such as an electoral commission or the courts.Democracy is a universally recognised ideal as well as a goal, which is based on common values shared by peoples throughout the world community irrespective of cultural, political, social and economic differences. It is thus a basic right of citizenship to be exercised under conditions of freedom, equality, transparency and responsibility, with due respect for the plurality of views, and in the interest of the polity.A state of democracy ensures that the processes by which power is acceded to, wielded and alternates allow for free political competition and are the product of open, free and non-discriminatory participation by the people, exercised in accordance with the rule of law, in both letter and spirit.Democracy is founded on the primacy of the law and the exercise of human rights. In a democratic State, no one is above the law and all are equal before the law.The key element in the exercise of democracy is the holding of free and fair elections at regular intervals enabling the people's will to be expressed. These elections must be held on the basis of universal, equal and secret suffrage so that all voters can choose their representatives in conditions of equality, openness and transparency that stimulate political competition. To that end, civil and political rights are essential, and more particularly among them, the rights to vote and to be elected, the rights to freedom of expression and assembly, access to information and the right to organise political parties and carry out political activities. Party organisation, activities, finances, funding and ethics must be properly regulated in an impartial manner in order to ensure the integrity of the democratic processes.Now, we're back to the 'Pork Barrel Politics'. According to Andrew H. Sidman, 'Pork barrel' [or simply 'pork'] is a pejorative term for a collection of supposedly wasteful federally funded projects in United States—wasteful in the sense that the benefits of these projects are geographically concentrated, meaning that taxpayers are forced to fund many projects from which they receive little or no direct benefit. Pork barreling is also a process, a means of creating and passing legislation. Decrying the growth of the pork barrel in the early twentieth century, Chester Maxey equated the pork barrel with the use of the omnibus bill as a means of appropriating money for river and harbor projects. Pork barreling in this sense is the process by which multiple projects are combined into one piece of legislation to vastly increase the prospects for each project. When these projects were voted on individually, many of them failed, presumably because of the highly concentrated nature of the benefits.The story of Pork Barrel in American politics is not just a story of individual attitudes, but the opinions and behavior of the mass public do play a crucial part. Incumbents, challengers, and campaign donors all respond to an electoral context in which voters decide the outcome— voters who can be moved or persuaded under the right conditions. Sidman suggests that the pork barrel is never a salient issue in its own right but that at high levels of polarization, there exist systematic links between the pork barrel and attitudes on government spending. As polarization increases, distributive spending leads to increasing support for incumbents among liberals and decreasing support among conservatives.Spending on public works represents the classic pork barrel project (e.g., the new post office, bridge maintenance) that constituents are assumed to favor regardless of their political predispositions. Building these projects means employment in the community, purchases from local suppliers, and a finished product from which local residents will benefit. Despite this, public-works spending, like the pork barrel broadly, is rooted in ideological conflict.Mayhew’s suggestion that pork is an important source of credit claiming, added to observations of universalism, has led to theoretical arguments supporting the assumption that voters generally prefer particularistic benefits and reward legislators who secure those benefits. The assumption of electoral benefits finds justification in work finding that electorally vulnerable legislators tend to secure a larger share of spending and in work observing that party leaders use pork to promote policy and electoral ends.Most scholars assume positive relationship between pork and the likelihood of voting for the incumbent, but such a general relationship has been difficult to verify empirically or may be conditioned by individual-level factors such as ideology.Polarization is the catalyst necessary for the pork barrel to affect electoral outcomes. It is only when the political world becomes more divided over everything else that the average voter pays more attention to distributive spending, linking it to their more general preferences regarding government spending. During periods of low polarization, systematic general effects of the pork bar- rel are largely absent. When polarization is high, pork barrel spending affects primary competition, campaign spending, and ultimately vote share in general elections.Electoral motivations are central to our understanding of distributive politics. Polarization and the partisan-ideological sorting of voters that has accompanied it, not only condition the electoral effects of the pork barrel, but polarization also shapes the pork barrel itself. The effects of the pork barrel on competition are not limited to primary elections. The relationships between the pork barrel and election outcomes are conditioned by political polarization and consistent with an ideology-based view of the pork barrel. The pork barrel carries different electoral implications in a polarized era and is a meaningful conclusion for scholars of elections and distributive politics.So, what are the implications of this conception foconceptr Election Fraud in Indonesia? Before the 2014 election, the ideological polarization that occurred in Indonesia was relatively low, so the distribution of social assistance such as 'Direct Cash Assistance' was not yet seen as fraud. After the 2014 and even 2019 elections, polarization crept up, so that, as Sidman stated, the electability preferences of incumbents were wide open. In the 2024 election, the incumbent did not run, but there was nepotism in terms of the candidates.The challenge of ensuring the integrity and quality of elections is no longer limited to well-established and newly emerging democracies. Elections now take place in ever more challenging environments, including territories under military occupation. These cases raise important questions about our under standing of election fraud and election integrity, as well as our understanding of the role that elections play in a community’s political life.Elections are central to our understanding of democracy. For example, Robert Dahl’s definition of a polyarchy includes five election-related criteria: the government must be controlled by elected officials; elected officials must be chosen and removed in free, fair, and frequent elections where coercion must be absent; all adults must have the right to vote and most must be able to run for offices; and citizens must have the rights of freedom of expression and association as well as alternative sources of information. Within this context, election fraud is usually defined in procedural terms.In its narrowest form, the concept of election fraud can be understood as 'the corruption of the process by which votes are cast and counted.' However, many analysts define fraud more broadly to encompass activities at any stage of the electoral process, from voter registration to the final tally of the ballots.' As Larry Diamond puts it, 'Elections are fair when they are administered by a neutral authority; when the electoral administration is sufficiently competent and resourceful to take specific precautions against fraud in the voting and vote counting; when the police, military, and courts treat competing candidates and parties impartially throughout the process; when con tenders all have access to the public media; when electoral districts and rules do not systematically disadvantage the opposition; when inde pendent monitoring of the voting and vote-counting is allowed at all locations; when the secrecy of the ballot is protected; when virtually all adults can vote; when the procedures for organizing and counting the vote are transparent and known to all; and when there are clear and impartial procedures for resolving complaints and disputes.'What should we expect from competitive elections? Elections are not pretty, says Przeworski. While politicians have to pretend to be inspirational, claiming that their lofty ideals will lead us to a radiant future, they use every hook or crook to win. They sometimes make promises they know to be infeasible, tinker with rules when they can and evade them when they cannot, and try to mute the voice of the people who may be opposed to them. No wonder quite a few people either just turn off or dream of somehow eliminating the features of elections that offend while preserving the very mechanism of selecting rulers.However, not all the reasons for which people complain about elections are good reasons: some are based on a misunderstanding of elections as a mechanism by which we make collective decisions. Politicians indeed try to persuade and seduce, but they look at the surveys and the encounter groups, they gauge the winds of public opinion, and then try to guess what we want. They offer them because they believe these policies are what a majority of us want. Parties promise what they think would make them most likely to win. Had a majority wanted something different, competing parties would have offered something different. Hence, the electorate, as a collectivity, chooses even when none of us has a choice at the polling place.Voting is not an action that makes individuals feel empowered, but this is not a valid reason for complaint. In a large electorate, no one can say 'I voted for A, so A won.' In fact, we cast our votes and then rush home and turn on the TV to learn, often uncertain late into the night, who won. From the individual point of view, the results of an election are like those of flipping a coin: there is no causal relation between action and outcome. The value of elections is not that each voter has real influence on the final result, but that collective choice is made by summing the total of individual wills. Even if individuals see their own vote as ineffective, they should value voting as a procedure for making collective choices, and there is dramatic evidence that often they do: some people have sacrificed their lives for the ideal of free elections. To value elections, it is sufficient that 'Both governors and governed must recognize ‘will-revealing’ procedures and view them as communicating instructions, which governing agencies are then expected to execute as a matter of course'.We value elections because they are the second best to what we would really like: each of us being free to do whatever one wants. We have to live together and to live together we must be governed. No one likes to be ordered to do what one does not want to do or to be forbidden to do what one wants to, but governed we must be. And because we cannot all govern at the same time, at best we can choose by whom and how we would be governed, reserving the right to get rid of governments we do not like. This is what elections enable us to do.Something is interesting about Cicero's letter to Quintus Marco Fratri:'Et petitio magistratus divisa est in duarum rationum diligentiam, quarum altera in amicorum studiis, altera in populari voluntate ponenda est. amicorum studia beneficiis et officiis et vetustate et facilitate ac iucunditate naturae parta esse oportet. Sed hoc nomen amicorum in petitione latius patet quam in cetera vita. Quisquis est enim qui ostendat aliquid in te voluntatis, qui colat, qui domum ventitet, is in ami- corum numero est habendus. Sed tamen, qui sunt amici ex causa iustiore cognationis aut adfinitatis aut sodalitatis aut alicuius necessitudinis, iis carum et iucundum esse maxime prodest.'[Running for office can be divided into two kinds of activity: securing the support of your friends and winning over the general public. You gain the goodwill of friends through kindness, favors, old connections, availability, and natural charm. But in an election, you need to think of friendship in broader terms than in everyday life. For a candidate, a friend is anyone who shows you goodwill or seeks out your company. But don’t neglect those who are your friends in the traditional sense through family ties or social connections. These you must continue to carefully cultivate.]We'll go on again on the next session, bi 'idhnillah."And before moving on to the next session, Maple sang,Have you seen the little piggiescrawling in the dirt?And for all the little piggieslife is getting worseAlways having dirt to play around in *)
Citations & References:
- Guy S. Goodwin-Gill, Free and Fair Elections, 2006, Inter-Parliamentary Union
- Andrew H. Sidman, Pork Barrel Politics: How Government Spending Determines Elections in a Polarized Era, 2019, Columbia University Press
- Quintus Tullius Cicero, How to Win an Election: An ancient Guide for Modern Politicians, translated and with an introduction by Philip Freeman, 2012, Princeton University Press
*) "Piggies" written by George Harrison
