February 23, 2017

In these crazy times, people have some seriously messed up ideas about democracy.

Here are some things that are not democracy:

• winning a vote by lying about what your opponents have done in the past ^{1 2 3}
• winning a vote by making wild, unsubstantiated claims about what your opponents intend to do ^{1 2}
• winning a vote by lying about what you have done in the past ¹
• winning a vote by making wild, unsubstantiated promises, and then failing to fulfil any (or many) of them ^{2 4 5}
• winning a vote by framing the question in a way that doesn’t allow people to choose reasonable alternatives ^{3 4 5}
• winning a vote by framing the question in such a vague way that nobody can say what the result actually means ⁴
• using the result of a vote won using one of these methods to justify never holding a similar vote again ^{3 4 5}

If democracy means anything at all, then it requires informed choice.

Informed choice requires two things: being given an actual meaningful choice, and being given the relevant facts.

When any form of lying, obfuscation or outright fraud is involved in the win, then the winner (and their supporters) do not get to claim the moral high ground.

When any form of incompetent framing is involved, the winner (and their supporters) do not get to claim some sort of finality.

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