US Presidential Election 2020: A litmus test for democracy disrupted by COVID19 and mass surveillance!

US Presidential Elections 2020

By Steffi Singh*

Trump’s day of reckoning as final countdown begins

Today is Tuesday, November 3, 2020. The precarious and utterly polarized US election is upon us. Polls are taking place across the US at different times Tuesday, anywhere after 6 am and before 9 pm local time. Over 95 million people have already cast their votes in person or by mail-in ballots. In a last ditch effort to woo the electorates, President Donald Trump, seeking reelection for a second term as Republican nominee air dashed to North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin on Monday. On the same day his Democratic challenger Joe Biden remained in Pennsylvania supported by former president Barack Obama, who visited Florida and Ohio.

This election is being held in the middle of a devastating pandemic that has claimed more than 220,000 American lives, aside from a series of civil rights protests and a fallen economy. This election is deemed to define the future course of America and its outcome will also affect the democracies in the world. But all will be clear only when counting of votes, which will begin at 7 PM EST on November 3, ends with the closing of the last polls. In the past, seldom have the election results been declared on the election night!

The most important question in everyone’s mind is that will Donald Trump survive? His day of reckoning is near completion. And if he does not survive, getting defeated by Biden, the million dollar question is that whether he will  pack up his bags full to the brim with “Make America Great Again” red caps and leave with integrity and grace? It’s unlikely.

This poses a problem not just for the US but for every ‘democratic’ institution across the globe. The notion of democracy has long been a myth in the western hemisphere and as the most corrosive and embattled election in US history takes place one thing is becoming abundantly clear. Democracy must evolve quickly if it is to survive at all.

The term democracy is derived from the Greek word ‘demos’ meaning, people and ‘kratos’ meaning power (to govern oneself). The foundations of democracy can be traced back to 500 bc in Athens.

Democracy in its purest form should be power to the people but the longstanding electoral college voting system in the US in fact- dismisses the results of the popular vote, and instead a small, vested interest group, long established institutions with little to no interest in the majority of the people’s woes will decide the future leadership of the US.

Just bear in mind a little publicized fact that Hillary Clinton received 2.87 million more votes than Trump in the 2016 election. Trump on the other hand received 304 to her 227 in the electoral votes. While the electoral college system allocates votes per capita of state in a strange system of proportional representation by state not person it still seems to be one way of manipulating power, hardly democratic.

Even the founding fathers of the US were not some random selection of representatives of the peoples of America. They were extraordinarily wealthy white, landowners derived from the UK for the most part. The US war of independence itself was only to emancipate 13 British colonies on the East coast of America. The US constitution proclaimed that all men were born free and equal. Well in an age of slavery and the absence of women from the vote that could not possibly have been further from the truth.

In most modern states some form of democracy was a direct response to the collapse of monarchies across most of the western world. The parliaments that emerged were not derived from some random selection of all vested interests, rather the first parliaments were full to the brim with the gentrylanded classes (usually with high links to the previous monarchy ruling class) As a result, this notion of power to the people is an absolute myth.

While amendments to most constitutions have emerged over time they are not without prolonged legal battles and often times they still tend to favour the interest of few not all of the people of a state.

Democracy in its purest sense, embodies a number of key features; freedom of speech, freedom of press, zero censorship, equality and freedom of assembly. Covid19 has offered many governments of the world a unique opportunity to curtail so many freedoms at one time. Furthermore, the mass collection of citizens’ identities and movements via means of electronic devices is staggering. Our very DNA is been collected on a mass scale and ‘emergency’ legislation is being drafted left, right and centre in governments across the world.

This presents an enormous impending threat that very few seem to recognize. In age of mass surveillance, we are being watched, propaganda and fake news is shoved in our faces with daily dopamine hits across all social media platforms and the very fabrics of our societies are becoming entirely eroded at an utterly alarming rate. Mass protest are occurring across large parts of the world as people resist changes being made by undemocratic means by a few vested interests in centralized versions of democratic parliaments. Today across Europe, Democracy is in deep decline and far right nationalism is a sweeping movement now gaining real momentum across the globe. Xenophobia has been exploited in its entirety by the global pandemic that has resulted from Covid 19 or the ‘China Virus’ as Trump’s expert diplomatic skills have named it.

Democracy is dying before our very eyes and the US elections once hailed as a visionary in the free world, the epitome of capitalism, signals perhaps the greatest threat to democracy thus far. If Biden by some miracle wins the US election, Trump has on multiple occasions indicated that we will have to ‘wait and see’ if he accepts the result!