Democracy

My workmate was telling me about voting process in her homeland, Russia. It's a tad different from over here where you can wander into a polling station wherever you like in your electorate, announce your name without providing proof of identity, fill in your flimsy piece of recycled paper with a pencil and drop it into a cardboard box guarded by a pensioner with a poking stick. Over there you need to show up to a particular polling station with your passport and registration number for that area. The ballot papers are full of anti-counterfeiting measures like we find in our currency, and you have to sign for them. Vote counters have a representative from each political party peering over their shoulders as they tally it all up and because of all the extra security results aren't usually known until the next day. It all sounds like they take the democratic process very seriously!
But then on the ABC I was watching a doco about the Russian oligarchs and how they were basically running the country for a few years there and it suddenly doesn't seem quite so democratic... But according to my workmate most Russians don't even know what was going on in that time and it made me realise how comfortable and trusting we Aussies are with our pollies and those in charge. We THINK we have this democratic process going, where even if we don't like what we get, at least a majority wanted it, but we could all be being duped so easily. All we'd need is a rubber or a match and poof! there goes a whole electorate's votes!