{"id":699,"date":"2005-01-21T02:55:42","date_gmt":"2005-01-21T02:55:42","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:58","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:58","slug":"whats_juan_cole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=699","title":{"rendered":"What’s Juan Cole A Professor Of, Again??"},"content":{"rendered":"

Listening to PRI on KPCC today, they started discussing the upcoming Iraqi elections, and my buddy Juan Cole comes on<\/a> (audio file).<\/p>\n

Listen to the gist of his comment: “The Iraqi people are being asked to vote for party lists or coalition lists…but they most often don’t know which politicians are running. I think it’s a little bit absurd to call that an election.<\/i>”<\/p>\n

Mr. Cole, please take a look at this:
\n\"ticket.jpg\"<\/p>\n

It’s a party ‘ticket’, one of the original paper ballots used up to the 19th Century here in the United States. Voters would drop the ‘ticket’ into the ballot box, and choosing a ticket was that way one voted.<\/p>\n

I’ll skip over the history in the urban East Coast, where political machines like Tammany used ties with immigrant groups to induce them to vote for candidates whose names they couldn’t read, and simply suggest that the ‘blanket’ or ‘Australian’ ballot – one that listed all the candidates for a party and allowed the voter to select one – wasn’t implemented in the US until very late in the 19th Century.<\/p>\n

…I could recommend some history books for the Professor, if he’d like.<\/p>\n

And yes, I’m aware that we do a better job of it now, and that it’s the 21st Century. But might we allow that democracy – like every other thing that grows – might have a start in Iraq that will look much like our own?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Listening to PRI on KPCC today, they started discussing the upcoming Iraqi elections, and my buddy Juan Cole comes on (audio file). Listen to the gist of his comment: “The Iraqi people are being asked to vote for party lists or coalition lists…but they most often don’t know which politicians are running. I think it’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}