NO CONFIDENCE
AUBREY MATSHIQI: Electoral system favours party bosses
‘This has never been about an open or secret ballot. It has always been about the voting procedure that opposition parties imagined would be the best weapon against Zuma’
There are two things Justice Louis D Brandeis (1856-1941), a US judge, said that I find particularly instructive.
"Those who won our independence … valued liberty as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty," Judge Brandeis said.
He also said: "The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
Since the office of the private citizen should be the highest office in our democracy, one of the ways in which we defend the rights of the citizen is by ensuring that in an election, such rights are protected through a secret ballot. However, the primary task of those who are deployed by the people to represent them in Parliament and SA’s legislatures is to defend the highest office in our democracy, the office of the citizen, by always acting in the best interests of so-called ordinary citizens. In the choice between an open ballot and a secret ballot, it is through the former that the rights of the citizen are better protected, because citizens will always be aware of the choices MPs and our legislatures make on their behalf.In general, therefore, we should err on the side of transparency. An open ballot should be our factory setting and a secret ballot should be our fall-back position when circumstances dictate that we defend democratic outcomes through such a ballot. Prior t...
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