Link Banana

These graphs — plotting ideology of Senators against Congressmen against voters — don’t surprise me, but it’s a very useful way to quickly understand how politics works.

(via kottke)

It sometimes feels like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe is following my program a tad too well.

A convoy carrying the Movement for Democratic Change leader was stopped at a police roadblock at 1000 GMT, party spokesman Nelson Chamisa said.

The MDC leader and his entourage were taken to a police station in the far west of the country, said Mr Chamisa.

“It appears they want to disrupt our campaign programme,” he said.

UPDATE (06/04/2008): He has been freed.

Specifically, does it count if you cast an absentee ballot but die before the actual day of the election? In South Dakota you wouldn’t count, but in other states you would.

In 2004, USA Today reported that California, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, and West Virginia all allow for the counting of absentee ballots of deceased voters while many other states technically do not. Many states that prohibit these so-called “ghost votes,” however, lack the reporting system to quickly update voter rolls with recent deaths. That means it’s very unlikely that a recently deceased voter would have his or her absentee ballot nullified.

The records of the central criminal court of London from 1674 to 1913 are now online. It’s not exactly the most user-friendly interface, but you can find some interesting tidbits. The Economist’s story has some interesting bits, like this:

Henry Williams, who in 1886 was sentenced to four months’ hard labour for “attempting an abominable crime with a mare”.

Another interesting — and sometimes ghastly — thing to do is see what crimes merited what punishment. Some truly gruesome punishments are on display, like John Morgan who was drawn and quatered in 1679 for “having received Orders from the See of Rome.”

Bruce Ackerman and Jennifer Nou offer the most interesting argument I’ve seen regarding the Supreme Court’s recent voter ID ruling:

Indiana’s law insists on a photo ID to vote, which in turn requires documents, like a birth certificate or passport, that verify identity. Getting these papers costs voters money as well as time and effort. This leads to the question the court failed to ask: Does the extra expense violate the absolute ban on all “taxes” imposed by the 24^th Amendment?

Count me among those opposed to this.

JOHANNESBURG — After more than a month’s delay, Zimbabwe officially announced the results of the March 29 presidential elections on Friday, saying that the opposition candidate had won but by not enough to avoid a runoff against President Robert Mugabe.

Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, won 47.9 percent of the vote, compared with Mr. Mugabe’s 43.2 percent, the electoral commission’s chief elections officer, Lovemore Sekeramayi, told reporters.

Ministers in Mr. Mugabe’s government had maintained for weeks that a runoff would be necessary against Mr. Tsvangirai.

Among the long list of countries I know next-to-nothing about, South America’s land-locked Paraguay has always been one of the most interesting to me. It doesn’t seem that the BBC knows much more about the country than I do — maybe that’s just their style — but this is probably good news:

Former Roman Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo has won Paraguay’s presidential election, ending more than six decades of rule by the Colorado Party.

With results declared in most polling stations, Mr Lugo has 41% of the vote.

His main rival, Blanca Ovelar of the Colorado Party, has 31% and former army chief Lino Oviedo 22%.

Manjushree Thapa shares some thoughts on Nepal’s twice-delayed elections. They’re a visceral reminder of all that we take for granted here.

Democracy may be imperfect, but unlike absolute systems like Maoism and monarchism, it incorporates mechanisms to correct its own flaws.

So, yes: I am planning to risk my life to vote today.

Not that the election will resolve much. Most Nepalis recognize that it will, in fact, send our country into an era of heightened instability.

Also, coverage of recent events there from The Economist.

Nothing in this piece is terribly surprising, but still I like to know how events in the United States are understood in other parts of the world. It would happen that though Hillary Clinton and John McCain are preferred by most Israelis, Mr. Obama is generally the favorite of Arabs. With one caveat:

Some Arabs are less smitten. Anti-Syrian politicians and activists in Lebanon may worry about Mr Obama’s willingness to start talks with Iran, fearing that they could result in America “selling out” Lebanon in exchange for a deal elsewhere in the region. But, for now, he seems to be the candidate of choice among Arabs.

Current has a pretty interesting video about Bhutan. Though it focuses on the problems that the country faces in the wake of the recent transition from a (generally benign) monarchy into a democracy, there are some interesting tidbits, like the prevalence of penises painted on walls — which are surprisingly not graffiti.

(via Passport)

The opposition has announced that they’ve won, even while “official” results aren’t announced.

In a press conference at 1.30 am on Sunday morning Zimbabwe time Tendai Biti, the secretary general of the larger of the two wings of the MDC, said that preliminary results showed sweeping margins of victory across the country, even in Zanu-PF’s traditional heartland. ”We’ve won this election,” he said. ”We must savour these scenes as for the rest of our lives we’ll say we were there.”

I’m hoping this doesn’t turn out like Kenya, but I’m increasingly fearing it will.

Zimbabwe’s been under the thumb of Robert Mugabe for over two decades. The difficult-to-read election this coming weekend will determine if his time is up. I’ve been saving stuff on this topic for a week, looking to avoid flooding readers with it. Now here it.

From The Economist’s massive — and well done — article:

And yet, despite this stack of advantages, Mr Mugabe is plainly on the defensive. He must fear that Zimbabwe is in a state of such economic and political ruin that he needs more of a head-start than the 20% or so of votes provided by the standard forms of rigging. For Zimbabweans, however, there are two worries. One is that Mr Mugabe steals the election. The other is that he just fails to, especially if that means the president is forced into a run-off. In that case, he may resort to outright violence. “The violence has so far been contained, more or less,” says a former ZANU-PF minister who has joined Mr Makoni, “but if the election goes to two rounds it’ll go right up.”

Also:

• In a review, The Economist tackles the making of Mugabe
• The Financial Times says Mugabe’s denying his opponents food
• The Guardian says the opposition had to eat it’s campaign poster (via BB)
• The BBC reports that Mugabe won’t let the opposition MDC win during his lifetime
• Newsweek has a story about the country’s hyperinflation

Today, Bhutan became a democracy. While admitting his faults, The Economist point out that monarchy wasn’t too bad to the small country:

Few elected governments could boast of the king’s record. Accelerating a reform process begun by his father, whom he succeeded in 1972, the king transformed Bhutan from one of the world’s most reclusive poor countries to one of its more enlightened.

Over the past 25 years its economy has grown at an average annualised rate of 7%, mainly on the back of sales of hydro-generated electricity to India. With massive investments in public health care, life expectancy has risen from 40 years at the time of the king’s succession to 66 years today. The school enrollment rate leapt by over 20% in the 1990s.

Maybe I’m the only one who enjoys discussions about demographics and voting patterns, but I thought this was interesting:

America’s suburbs used to be bastions of Republicanism. No longer. Robert Lang of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, examined the voting behaviour of metropolitan counties and found that close-in suburbs now reliably vote for Democrats. That should be expected: as they become more urban, their residents care more about public transport, schools and other government-sponsored activities—and they attract more city types, often of a liberal bent, from the urban centres.

So emerging suburbs and exurbs, the farthest-out among them, are the new political battleground. George Bush poured resources into this urban fringe in 2004, says Mr Lang, running up larger margins there than when he lost the popular vote in 2000. The result was Mr Bush’s more impressive re-election.

Given the ongoing mess in Sudan, the recent chaos in Chad, the shambles of Zimbabwe, and the still-fragile situation in Kenya, it easy to see Africa as a hopeless case. In the Washington Post, Craig Timberg points to the great steps forward that have been made in western Africa in the last decade.

Reborn as well, over the past decade, has been democracy itself here in Ghana and among its neighbors along West Africa’s Atlantic coast. From Sierra Leone east to Nigeria, stability and at least a tentative version of multiparty politics have begun taking hold after many years of coups, military dictatorships and civil war.

(via UN Dispatch)

The most effective way: shame.

[S]end out letters telling people whether they and their neighbors have voted in past elections and promising to send a followup letter after the election. The unsubtle message is: voting records are public information, and if you don’t vote this year your neighbors will know about it. So do your civic duty, dammit.

Result: turnout among those who got the letters was a whopping 8.1 percentage points higher than the control group.

The Economist, like most Western observers, has some strong words about the election of Dmitry Medvedev earlier today.

The polling station, and the country, have been hijacked by security men who do not even pretend to follow the law. The location of this incident, a busy shopping area, was also symbolic. Overwhelmed by the cornucopia of foreign goods, Russian consumers have so far been distracted from the Kremlin’s shenanigans.

The Christian Science Monitor sees some interesting demographics within Russia — and goes some small way toward explaining Putin’s popularity:

They are the Putin generation: young, often worldly, optimistic about their country’s future, and enthusiastic about a democracy they see as having more to do with higher living standards than checks and balances or freedom of speech. Acquainted only through history with the Soviet Union’s oppressive grip, but distinctly aware of their parents’ challenges during the tumultuous 1990s, they live in a Russia of unprecedented opportunities – ones shaped profoundly by Putin’s strong hand over the past eight years.

The Economist tackles the troubling situation in Zimbabwe and the hopeful — if remote — possibility that Robert Mugabe may finally have to leave office.

ROBERT MUGABE, Zimbabwe’s ageing president, celebrated his official birthday at the weekend. The 84-year-old threw a party at Beitbridge, on the border with South Africa, and launched his campaign for a sixth term in office. He has ruled for nearly three decades and expects to win re-election in a general and presidential election in March. He rehearsed his usual stump speech, hurling abuse at anyone who dares to stand up to him (he called one opposition leader, Simba Makoni, a “prostitute” and a puffed up frog) and blaming outsiders—notably George Bush and Britain’s Gordon Brown—for his country’s ever more miserable economic collapse.

In Pakistan (title link):

Pakistan appeared to be heading for a transition to an elected civilian government Tuesday after President Pervez Musharraf told visiting United States senators that he accepted the resounding defeat of his party in elections, and would work with a new Parliament.

Less surprisingly, in Cuba:

Fidel Castro stepped down Tuesday morning as the president of Cuba after a long illness. … The resignation ends one of the longest tenures as one of the most all-powerful communist heads of state in the world.