Election monitoring: Stop, step away from the ballot box

This hilariously funny video is undoubtedly poking fun at the whole process of foreign election monitoring across the developing world. One cannot help but conjure up the old popular Victorian theme of reaching out into the undiscovered world, saving the unenlightened and heathen communities across much of Africa, Asia and South America. Old popular Victorian heroes such as Dr. David Livingstone were charged with the responsibility and ‘duty’ of spreading Christianity, commerce and civilization to a part of the world that was popularly known as ‘Dark Africa’. Little was known about pre-colonial African society and going according to this spoof-which to some extent does reflect contemporary approaches to monitoring elections in developing countries-little is still known about the full context of the problems of the democratisation process in the developing world. In other words, a correlation between the foreign approaches at attempting to address socio-economic issues in the developing world in the Victorian era has to a large extent remained similar to the approach in the modern era.

As ridiculous as some of the assertions are such as: the holding of fake ballot papers down a voter’s pair of trousers; vote rigging-which is illustrated as commonly effected by leaders of the ruling party by physically stealing ballot boxes-remains painfully accurate. Electoral malpractices have widely been reported in countries such as Zambia in the 1996, 2001 and 2006 Presidential and Parliamentary Elections. The occurrence of electoral malpractice points toward the precarious state of the democratisation process in developing countries-something which foreign election monitors and organizations are ironically supposed to help prevent. As for the ‘bad’ voters highlighted by the several different colours who consistently ‘vote the wrong way’, one could cite the appallingly low voter turnouts at European elections in Britain as pointing toward a sharp sense of disillusionment about the role and function E.U. institutions play at state-level.

Overall, what makes this spoof funny and at times sad, is its accuracy in depicting certain problematic features of a developing a country whilst highlighting the ignorance, naivety and to some extent hypocrisy of overseas election monitors who evidently derive from regions where the electoral process is likewise marred with several shortcomings. The example of several people who, despite being registered to vote during Britain’s 2010 General Election, did not vote springs to mind as a travesty in modern electoral history. These shortcomings were not comprehensively reported and documented perhaps to maintain an impression of a ‘faultless democracy’, which is so brilliantly enforced by this spoof video.
- T. Lisulo

I think this is haliarious & outrageous it sends up well the anti-democratic tendency to view the developing world as one big basket case. Are we going to have election monitors coming here from the developing world?