Well well well. The Windy City has become a vacuum chamber of democratic despair. As the world watched, Chicago’s electoral machinery ground to a halt, producing a slow-motion car crash of ballot processing.
It was less an election count and more a theatrical exercise in bureaucratic futility: piles of papers shuffled like a demented game of solitaire, precincts reporting in a state of perpetual limbo. The American voter, that most patient of creatures, was reduced to a spectator in a pantomime of incompetence. Meanwhile, across the pond, the UK stands as a glistening beacon of balloting efficiency.
Our system, a triumph of administrative sanity, offers a crisp, orderly, and occasionally drizzly path to a result. It seems the Yanks could learn a thing or two from our ‘fill in a cross with a pencil’ approach. But let us not gloat.
Well, maybe a little. The slow count in Chicago is not a glitch, it is a feature of a system designed for maximum partisan squabbling and minimum civic satisfaction. The machines jam, the officials bicker, and the media cycles churn with baseless speculation.
It is a Rube Goldberg contraption of democracy where every lever is greased with money and every cog is made of partisan plastic. The American dream apparently includes a mandatory nap before knowing your next representative. While Chicago fiddles (with its electoral procedure), the rest of the world wonders why a nation that can land a drone on an aircraft carrier cannot count a pile of paper slips in a timely fashion.
Perhaps it is the gin. Or perhaps it is the absence of anything resembling a unified national system. The UK’s Electoral Commission, that dull but diligent body, is the envy of the world precisely because it is so profoundly boring.
The process is transparent, local, and generally concluded before the second bottle of wine is opened. A lesson, then: democracy is not a spectacle. It is a utility.
Like the water supply or the sewage system. And Chicago’s is, at this moment, backing up into the basement.
