Democracy

Foreword: The highest form of authority from my point of view is the individual because you only listen to laws & authority because you yourself choose to. Even if there are consequences for disobeying laws, these consequences themselves can be thwarted by actions of the individual. So, for me, individuals are the highest form of authority & individuals form a land & the greatest group of those individuals decide the outcome of a land. This is what I assume democracy is. 

We've seen many elections around the world & here in Africa most of them have some controversy like missing ballot boxes, ghost voters etc. This Greek invention of democracy does not seem to work most times in Africa being a people that were ruled by kings & chiefs. So how can we tweak it to suit Africans? Since the world has decided that majority rules is the best way to run a land, we can't exactly return to full absolute monarchy with all it's colourful benefits & flaws so we're stuck with this paper wasting exercise of putting ink on paper, marking an "X" next to our preferred individual. 

Ancient Athens: The birthplace of democracy

The number one problem with elections is the fact that you can never tell who voted for who. Why is a vote a secret? Does a secret ballot really make sense in a corrupt land? Secret ballot is almost always certain to benefit those who are most corrupt. Secret ballot is likely the main reason of ballot boxes being stolen & ghost voters. Were individuals, by law, forced to show who they voted for, people could simply count & see if there has been election fraud. 

The number two big problem with elections is that people vote & rely on other people to count their vote. Not only does this waste time & paper but relies on the integrity of the vote counter. Why do we not consider human error in this? A person could be paid money to not count certain votes for certain individuals. I propose a simple counting machine (or other counting method) with a publicly visible count for each individual or political party in the election. This counter would have no software so could not be hacked not that a live counter visible to all in public would be easy to hack in any case. Everytime there is a vote for an individual/party, the counter display would tick & the exact live count for that individual/party would be displayed for all to see at each individual voting station the separate voting station counters would then supply numbers for a national count for national media. 

Since we can't all assemble in a room & hear by voices saying "Aye" to make an accurate democratic decision, fixing the two problems mentioned above is probably the next most foolproof method of getting an accurate election result for both referendums & general elections for us to keep democratic integrity & avoid election fraud.