States of emergency
You may or may not be shocked to hear that we are in the middle of a pandemic that at the time of posting, has killed over one hundred thousand people in America alone and 374 thousand people across the entire world that have been confirmed, though with poor reporting from the PR of China and the Russian Federation, among others, in less than six months, almost a 9/11 every day.
This disease is highly contagious (changing the R-Nought number from 1.3 like the common influenza, H1N1, to 2 like COVID-19, after ten rounds of people sharing it, makes it go from 56 people sick with influenza to 2047 people sick), is very dangerous to the elderly and anyone with things like pneumonia, spreads via airborne transmission, and made it's way from about 34 thousand dead in late March around the world to eleven times that much in just about 70 days. That's two and a half 9/11s every day.
Of course, people are getting very freaked out, they can't see the enemy and so they literally cannot see why they should be restricted even if their brain's logical processes know why, hundreds of millions around the world have lost their jobs, the stock market has also crashed in combination with an oil price war, governmental tax revenue is going to get crushed, and people have to stay in their homes stewing. Many governments were already deeply unpopular around the world, embroiled in serious scandal, or were in extremely polarized societies, or with major factions of a country geographically or socially deeply suspicious of the ruling government, or some combination of them all.
The kind of restrictions necessary to keep people safe in emergencies, including from pandemics, but also severe rioting, armed conflict, and natural disasters, and the resources necessary to keep people around, such as their food, energy (ironically one of the cheapest things in the world right now), and essential workers, plus a tax revenue plus likely massive deficits, are very hard to organize in societies with emergencies of this nature.
There is also danger in giving power to too many people. The decisions become much more centralized as people in bigger bodies can't make decisions as quickly when hours or days could mean the difference between a disease killing a few hundred to tens of thousands, when local authorities often have nowhere remotely close to the resources and coordination to pass things and often lack the strong power to enforce things like an international travel ban, can't shift resources around, and when you often want to blame someone else, like the opposition parties in the legislature.
But, importantly, there is also a lot of danger in giving it to too few. Already embroiled leaders often face tough elections and want to keep that power after an election, and so the powers they have are very tempting to be used to oppose them. Corruption payouts if you're successful and are capable of dismissing the inspectors generals or auditor generals who can stop you can be enormous and net you profits in the hundreds of millions of dollars worth, or more, for individuals, and billions for organized groups and companies. There are few ways of safely organizing to protest a government mismanaging a crisis, as Minneapolis is showing. Or a leader could abdicate their responsibility and turn it over to others who while being in a much worse position to combat the problem, will be given the blame for things going wrong.
This is why it's essential to organize a constitutional order or organized plan to reflect this possibility, and neglecting or refusing to create these safeguards in times of peace will lead to you supporting the one who provides for you in the here and how and keeps you on a leash so that the here and now is eternal.
A president or executive such as a prime minister or cabinet is normally easy to convene, has a low quorum, and can be protected as individuals both from violence and diseases, and are normally already closely involved with knowing what happens in their department and is likely already familiar with how things happen. They get training in the transition from the previous regime. Giving them powers to declare emergencies of this nature is very helpful.
But this is an obvious conflict of interest. They have an interest in declaring emergencies to get their will even when there is no emergency. There should thus be some criteria to an emergency. They should exclude things that are pretenses such as a typical labour strike or organized but peaceful protest. As annoying as Canada's railway blockades and strikes were this last year, they didn't constitute a national emergency. You could have shipped things by truck if you had to for essential goods. A policy program that was expressly rejected by a legislature after having the opportunity to debate and vote on it, shouldn't be able to be substituted by declaring a state of emergency and transferring funds or powers requisite to implementing the program anyway. And you can add some basic possibilities for a crisis such as natural disaster, extreme weather, war or coups' detat or armed insurrections that are happening now or are imminent (as opposed to just likely), as imminent as Egypt's Anwar Sadat's attempt at capturing Israel along with Syria.
A good definition to use is an unusual or unexpected event or events, which directly endangers lives or property which is essential to the functioning of society, which is beyond the power of local authorities to intervene by their normal processes, which is expected to be of a temporary nature, and urgent nature where delay is likely to expose people to severe risk, where the powers to be invoked and limits on rights would be proportional to the threat posed, and which cannot be addressed by the means of using powers less substantial as a state of emergency power. Please don't include international sanctions here as most of America's emergencies have actually been since Nixon, they should be a different process and also one more so overseen by a foreign policy committee with the right of appeal to a court over the validity.
There should be involvement by powers outside the executive though. The leader of the opposition is a good person to include here. The US doesn't have a leader of the opposition but it does have majority and minority leaders of the legislature. If your speaker or president of a legislative body is normally a neutral figure, more so the case in say the American Senate than in the House for instance, including them too would be a good idea. The chief justice of your highest court that protects rights and freedoms and checks the powers of the other branches is a good person to consult with. The leaders of the security departments would be rational, as would the chief meteorologist and the chief medical officer, to show that there is in fact a rational basis for the emergency to exist. The leaders of parties other than the leader of the opposition and the leader of the governing parties, in a multi party system, they too should be involved at least enough to get the seats which comprise most of the legislature no matter how two party or many partied it is, the committee chairs and vice chairs of the committees of public safety in the legislature, by whatever name they go by. They provide some legislative oversight over the powers at hand with experience in the field. And if the emergency is more concentrated in some areas over others, the leaders of people in that area should be involved.
They can range from consultation to actual advice and necessary consent. Consultation at a minimum should be provided for all of these sorts of people. But consent may not necessarily be helpful. The legislative speakers and judges should be seen as neutral and so making a decision of this nature could be damaging to their independence. The security officers could be the ones responsible for the emergency, such as if the idea is a coup d'etat, or is the result of mismanagement of say a war they were involved in. Ideally, they should be elected people in their own right so they can be dismissed by the public if they mismanaged the crisis and refused to be reasonable, and so this suggests the leaders of opposition parties and maybe the committee chairs as being the best people to have to give mandatory consent for emergency powers to be invoked at all. In a parliamentary or semi presidential republic, add the prime minister and the president together to this list, especially if the president is directly elected as they are in places like Ireland, Finland, or the Czech Republic.
Legislative oversight can come in many forms. It would be helpful to have a committee elected by the other members which is small enough to meet rationally in an emergency, even by telephone or online if necessary or in a social distancing session, which proportionally represents all parties, and is ready to go at any time. Such a standing committee, staying together even when the legislature is say home campaigning for their party or is not in session, could also have other useful functions like being able to call them back in session (which should happen automatically in a state of emergency anyway) in unusual situations such as during peacetime when a damning report provides a reason to say impeach the president or governor or hold a vote of no confidence in a prime minister. This committee, being elected by the other members especially the backbenchers, is also representative of the parties and wouldn't just be the ones who coincidentally happened to be most able to meet, perhaps selectively chosen by the party leaders to attend to fill a quorum who happen to be most aligned with the views of the leadership.
The legislature could also be required to approve of the emergency in a short period of time such as three days, seven days, at most just a couple weeks, or at least give one authorization by the standing committee to allow for the rest to meet up and plan safely. They could also be required to approve of extensions on a regular basis, not just being required to try to overcome the legislative veto and allowing for a party leader to avoid the question by not attempting a vote. The emergency should expire without this consent, and an emergency on the same factual basis should be denied without this consent. It would also be pertinent to add increasingly large majorities to sustain the emergency for long periods of time, such as say a majority vote to approve in the days after, but a 2/3 vote in the first month, a 3/4 vote after six months, with authorizations required monthly.
The courts should also be given extra credence. They should have the highest court immediately be able to review cases, be required to on demand of some oversight methods such as appeals of people arrested in the crisis and at risk of long terms of punishment, opposition groups, backbenchers, and more, and give verdicts in days or weeks, not months or years to prevent the damage from happening for too long. But also importantly, the court must have been seen as an impartial institution and widely respected long since before the emergency or else it will be abused for partisan purposes or authoritarian purposes, or both. An independent commission proposing judges by open application and public interviews, giving the legislature judges and their chief justices to appoint by a 2/3 vote in each house, and given tenure to say the age of 70 and removal only by recommendation of that commission for cause of incompetence, negligence, crimes, conflicts of interest, or violations of ethics and transparency rules, and with 2/3 of each house to remove, and salaries and pensions indexed to CPI that can't be reduced and are proposed by a different independent commission and adopted by a supermajority, would be a strong independent court that is respected by all parties.
Many people view human rights as important, but many can be hard to maintain the same way in a state of emergency. Freedom of assembly, as you can imagine, would be likely to be dangerous in an epidemic this infectious. But there are some rights that can be made more sacrosanct, inviolable. The freedom from being executed or tortured in any way can be protected. A civilized country which is a free and democratic country that respects the rule of law and values human life does not torture people, and I'm looking at you Richard Cheney no matter how equally you may apply the torture to both gay and straight people. Even the Russian constitution, as strong as it makes it's president, protects life, human dignity, inviolability of personal privacy and reputation, freedom of religion and conscience, free markets, freedom from homelessness, judicial appeals, the right to an attorney, presumption of innocence, double jeopardy, fruit of the poisoned tree, self incrimination, the right to compensation for seized assets for the public good, that victims have the right to have their cases fairly examined, and no retroactive laws, during states of emergency.
Which rights you would include in this list can be hard to decide, as opposed to perhaps having a rule imposing something closer to strict scrutiny by a court, but these kinds of things shouldn't be decided ad hoc during the emergency itself.
It should also be unconstitutional to amend the constitution itself during the state of emergency. The world knows many ways that can go awry. The obvious problem of a person seizing power to become a dictator by amending rules that limit their powers such as a term limit is present, but also less obvious problems like how constitutions are normally negotiated settlements to important problems and often delicately protecting a balance of power, and an emergency warps your remembrance of that the balance is often delicate. Amending laws that provide for specific protections related to emergency powers, procedures, reporting and auditing requirements, and similar, should also be restricted from being amended, such as forbidding the standing committee I mentioned from approving more than temporary sums of expenditure and debt and the invocation of powers, requiring a supermajority to amend it during the emergency, having absolute majorities which require minimum amounts of support regardless of the possible turnout by having legislators mostly staying at home, having constitutional minimums for what kind of rules are necessary such as a free and complete audit by an inspector general, and having a court examine the bill and approve of the change as being constitutional before it can go into effect.
Elections are often being postponed in many countries. South Korea proved it can be done, holding an election during a pandemic, but it's very risky to do so, and South Korea took many intensive steps and was already a democratic country with consolidated changes in power, independent oversight bodies already established such as a neutral electoral commission, and a demonstrated willingness to oust a leader proven to be corrupt as they did to their president in 2016 without much regard to party affiliation. It's hard to campaign fairly, to canvass donations or hold rallies or install advertisements, it's hard to physically vote, and any irregularities or pre-existing biases in any electoral system will be even more dangerous. Most countries have a means of doing it, but they should not give this power to the executive alone, an independent elections body, widely respected, often is responsible for proposing this course of action, and the legislature is normally responsible for approving of it by cross party actions. Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, one of few types of rights that is immune from the notwithstanding clause and is one of the sections that cannot be amended by unilateral action of parliament by section 44 of the Constitution Act 1982, is that the elected legislatures in Canada have a maximum duration of 5 years (many have by statute reduced it to 4), and only by a 2/3 vote can they extend it in times of real or imminent war, invasion, or insurrection.
Mail in ballots are very controversial in America but this in part depends on the election authorities, state secretaries of state, themselves often being partisans, and also with so much at stake. A four year term and with their own party virtually certain to not support an impeachment and conviction of them and having enough votes to prevent such, for a president, and a single winner system without proportional top up seats, that's a lot to bank on. In a system based on much more inclusive negotiations for president or in a runoff or ranked ballot election for any executive president, with many independent bodies choosing important people like judges and auditors, dependent on continued legislative concurrence for policy choices and not merely the refusal of their members to try to countermand the president, and with many parties open to people and a good shot at winning in each district, with the contests there not being all or nothing, and with removal processes by recall for policy disagreements and fair trials for allegations of true misconduct or corruption, and with elections officials being independent authorities themselves, mail in ballots and electioneering in general is a much smaller risk, and thus, in any real election during a state of emergency, holding an election anyway is a much smaller risk.
In countries with multi party politics, they are capable of amazing jobs. New Zealand has been truly incredible in how they responded to this pandemic. Despite not actually having the protection of a constitution that is safe from a majority vote the way that most constitutions would be, as limits on the parliaments themselves, they still respected transparent responses and effectiveness as well as putting aside so many of their partisan differences for a common outcome. If the US had NZ's per capita outcome, it would have 1450 deaths. Of course, every death is a tragedy, but you'd be about 70 times less likely to be killed by this pandemic in New Zealand than America. A country that was truly pro-life would be greatly inspired by the way that Kiwis responded and the political and social systems by which they can have competent responses and a reason for why their parties are not as antagonistic in all this. But it was also predicated on how New Zealand on almost all metrics, was among the best countries in the world long since before the pandemic, with budget transparency bested only by Sweden, human rights being well respected, the best corruption ratings, a proportional representation system, and has also been very inclusive of the racial minorities of their Maori people in ways most countries with major racial minorities are not.
The one hundred thousand deaths in the United States so far, and the 374 thousand in the world, were mostly preventable despite how little we know about this virus and how we don't have a vaccine for it. We have made great strides in epidemiology, the H1N1 virus killed one hundred million people in just two years from 1918 on, in a world of only about 1.8 billion (proportional to today, that would be like erasing two Brazils, one and a third Americas, the remaining European Union, two Nigerias, three Russias, 11 Canadas, or one third of either China or India. Still not a Second Impact though), which was also deadlier than the entire World War One, World War Two, the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide, the American Civil War, and the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922, combined. But we don't have to tolerate what we have already done when we have much left to do.
When your kids come to you one day and ask why the world listened to stupid and corrupt leaders in 2020 and hated our neighbours, a time which was technologically capable of great human capacity and love for our Planet, which we all share without a care of nature to respect national borders, what will you say to them?
This disease is highly contagious (changing the R-Nought number from 1.3 like the common influenza, H1N1, to 2 like COVID-19, after ten rounds of people sharing it, makes it go from 56 people sick with influenza to 2047 people sick), is very dangerous to the elderly and anyone with things like pneumonia, spreads via airborne transmission, and made it's way from about 34 thousand dead in late March around the world to eleven times that much in just about 70 days. That's two and a half 9/11s every day.
Of course, people are getting very freaked out, they can't see the enemy and so they literally cannot see why they should be restricted even if their brain's logical processes know why, hundreds of millions around the world have lost their jobs, the stock market has also crashed in combination with an oil price war, governmental tax revenue is going to get crushed, and people have to stay in their homes stewing. Many governments were already deeply unpopular around the world, embroiled in serious scandal, or were in extremely polarized societies, or with major factions of a country geographically or socially deeply suspicious of the ruling government, or some combination of them all.
The kind of restrictions necessary to keep people safe in emergencies, including from pandemics, but also severe rioting, armed conflict, and natural disasters, and the resources necessary to keep people around, such as their food, energy (ironically one of the cheapest things in the world right now), and essential workers, plus a tax revenue plus likely massive deficits, are very hard to organize in societies with emergencies of this nature.
There is also danger in giving power to too many people. The decisions become much more centralized as people in bigger bodies can't make decisions as quickly when hours or days could mean the difference between a disease killing a few hundred to tens of thousands, when local authorities often have nowhere remotely close to the resources and coordination to pass things and often lack the strong power to enforce things like an international travel ban, can't shift resources around, and when you often want to blame someone else, like the opposition parties in the legislature.
But, importantly, there is also a lot of danger in giving it to too few. Already embroiled leaders often face tough elections and want to keep that power after an election, and so the powers they have are very tempting to be used to oppose them. Corruption payouts if you're successful and are capable of dismissing the inspectors generals or auditor generals who can stop you can be enormous and net you profits in the hundreds of millions of dollars worth, or more, for individuals, and billions for organized groups and companies. There are few ways of safely organizing to protest a government mismanaging a crisis, as Minneapolis is showing. Or a leader could abdicate their responsibility and turn it over to others who while being in a much worse position to combat the problem, will be given the blame for things going wrong.
This is why it's essential to organize a constitutional order or organized plan to reflect this possibility, and neglecting or refusing to create these safeguards in times of peace will lead to you supporting the one who provides for you in the here and how and keeps you on a leash so that the here and now is eternal.
A president or executive such as a prime minister or cabinet is normally easy to convene, has a low quorum, and can be protected as individuals both from violence and diseases, and are normally already closely involved with knowing what happens in their department and is likely already familiar with how things happen. They get training in the transition from the previous regime. Giving them powers to declare emergencies of this nature is very helpful.
But this is an obvious conflict of interest. They have an interest in declaring emergencies to get their will even when there is no emergency. There should thus be some criteria to an emergency. They should exclude things that are pretenses such as a typical labour strike or organized but peaceful protest. As annoying as Canada's railway blockades and strikes were this last year, they didn't constitute a national emergency. You could have shipped things by truck if you had to for essential goods. A policy program that was expressly rejected by a legislature after having the opportunity to debate and vote on it, shouldn't be able to be substituted by declaring a state of emergency and transferring funds or powers requisite to implementing the program anyway. And you can add some basic possibilities for a crisis such as natural disaster, extreme weather, war or coups' detat or armed insurrections that are happening now or are imminent (as opposed to just likely), as imminent as Egypt's Anwar Sadat's attempt at capturing Israel along with Syria.
A good definition to use is an unusual or unexpected event or events, which directly endangers lives or property which is essential to the functioning of society, which is beyond the power of local authorities to intervene by their normal processes, which is expected to be of a temporary nature, and urgent nature where delay is likely to expose people to severe risk, where the powers to be invoked and limits on rights would be proportional to the threat posed, and which cannot be addressed by the means of using powers less substantial as a state of emergency power. Please don't include international sanctions here as most of America's emergencies have actually been since Nixon, they should be a different process and also one more so overseen by a foreign policy committee with the right of appeal to a court over the validity.
There should be involvement by powers outside the executive though. The leader of the opposition is a good person to include here. The US doesn't have a leader of the opposition but it does have majority and minority leaders of the legislature. If your speaker or president of a legislative body is normally a neutral figure, more so the case in say the American Senate than in the House for instance, including them too would be a good idea. The chief justice of your highest court that protects rights and freedoms and checks the powers of the other branches is a good person to consult with. The leaders of the security departments would be rational, as would the chief meteorologist and the chief medical officer, to show that there is in fact a rational basis for the emergency to exist. The leaders of parties other than the leader of the opposition and the leader of the governing parties, in a multi party system, they too should be involved at least enough to get the seats which comprise most of the legislature no matter how two party or many partied it is, the committee chairs and vice chairs of the committees of public safety in the legislature, by whatever name they go by. They provide some legislative oversight over the powers at hand with experience in the field. And if the emergency is more concentrated in some areas over others, the leaders of people in that area should be involved.
They can range from consultation to actual advice and necessary consent. Consultation at a minimum should be provided for all of these sorts of people. But consent may not necessarily be helpful. The legislative speakers and judges should be seen as neutral and so making a decision of this nature could be damaging to their independence. The security officers could be the ones responsible for the emergency, such as if the idea is a coup d'etat, or is the result of mismanagement of say a war they were involved in. Ideally, they should be elected people in their own right so they can be dismissed by the public if they mismanaged the crisis and refused to be reasonable, and so this suggests the leaders of opposition parties and maybe the committee chairs as being the best people to have to give mandatory consent for emergency powers to be invoked at all. In a parliamentary or semi presidential republic, add the prime minister and the president together to this list, especially if the president is directly elected as they are in places like Ireland, Finland, or the Czech Republic.
Legislative oversight can come in many forms. It would be helpful to have a committee elected by the other members which is small enough to meet rationally in an emergency, even by telephone or online if necessary or in a social distancing session, which proportionally represents all parties, and is ready to go at any time. Such a standing committee, staying together even when the legislature is say home campaigning for their party or is not in session, could also have other useful functions like being able to call them back in session (which should happen automatically in a state of emergency anyway) in unusual situations such as during peacetime when a damning report provides a reason to say impeach the president or governor or hold a vote of no confidence in a prime minister. This committee, being elected by the other members especially the backbenchers, is also representative of the parties and wouldn't just be the ones who coincidentally happened to be most able to meet, perhaps selectively chosen by the party leaders to attend to fill a quorum who happen to be most aligned with the views of the leadership.
The legislature could also be required to approve of the emergency in a short period of time such as three days, seven days, at most just a couple weeks, or at least give one authorization by the standing committee to allow for the rest to meet up and plan safely. They could also be required to approve of extensions on a regular basis, not just being required to try to overcome the legislative veto and allowing for a party leader to avoid the question by not attempting a vote. The emergency should expire without this consent, and an emergency on the same factual basis should be denied without this consent. It would also be pertinent to add increasingly large majorities to sustain the emergency for long periods of time, such as say a majority vote to approve in the days after, but a 2/3 vote in the first month, a 3/4 vote after six months, with authorizations required monthly.
The courts should also be given extra credence. They should have the highest court immediately be able to review cases, be required to on demand of some oversight methods such as appeals of people arrested in the crisis and at risk of long terms of punishment, opposition groups, backbenchers, and more, and give verdicts in days or weeks, not months or years to prevent the damage from happening for too long. But also importantly, the court must have been seen as an impartial institution and widely respected long since before the emergency or else it will be abused for partisan purposes or authoritarian purposes, or both. An independent commission proposing judges by open application and public interviews, giving the legislature judges and their chief justices to appoint by a 2/3 vote in each house, and given tenure to say the age of 70 and removal only by recommendation of that commission for cause of incompetence, negligence, crimes, conflicts of interest, or violations of ethics and transparency rules, and with 2/3 of each house to remove, and salaries and pensions indexed to CPI that can't be reduced and are proposed by a different independent commission and adopted by a supermajority, would be a strong independent court that is respected by all parties.
Many people view human rights as important, but many can be hard to maintain the same way in a state of emergency. Freedom of assembly, as you can imagine, would be likely to be dangerous in an epidemic this infectious. But there are some rights that can be made more sacrosanct, inviolable. The freedom from being executed or tortured in any way can be protected. A civilized country which is a free and democratic country that respects the rule of law and values human life does not torture people, and I'm looking at you Richard Cheney no matter how equally you may apply the torture to both gay and straight people. Even the Russian constitution, as strong as it makes it's president, protects life, human dignity, inviolability of personal privacy and reputation, freedom of religion and conscience, free markets, freedom from homelessness, judicial appeals, the right to an attorney, presumption of innocence, double jeopardy, fruit of the poisoned tree, self incrimination, the right to compensation for seized assets for the public good, that victims have the right to have their cases fairly examined, and no retroactive laws, during states of emergency.
Which rights you would include in this list can be hard to decide, as opposed to perhaps having a rule imposing something closer to strict scrutiny by a court, but these kinds of things shouldn't be decided ad hoc during the emergency itself.
It should also be unconstitutional to amend the constitution itself during the state of emergency. The world knows many ways that can go awry. The obvious problem of a person seizing power to become a dictator by amending rules that limit their powers such as a term limit is present, but also less obvious problems like how constitutions are normally negotiated settlements to important problems and often delicately protecting a balance of power, and an emergency warps your remembrance of that the balance is often delicate. Amending laws that provide for specific protections related to emergency powers, procedures, reporting and auditing requirements, and similar, should also be restricted from being amended, such as forbidding the standing committee I mentioned from approving more than temporary sums of expenditure and debt and the invocation of powers, requiring a supermajority to amend it during the emergency, having absolute majorities which require minimum amounts of support regardless of the possible turnout by having legislators mostly staying at home, having constitutional minimums for what kind of rules are necessary such as a free and complete audit by an inspector general, and having a court examine the bill and approve of the change as being constitutional before it can go into effect.
Elections are often being postponed in many countries. South Korea proved it can be done, holding an election during a pandemic, but it's very risky to do so, and South Korea took many intensive steps and was already a democratic country with consolidated changes in power, independent oversight bodies already established such as a neutral electoral commission, and a demonstrated willingness to oust a leader proven to be corrupt as they did to their president in 2016 without much regard to party affiliation. It's hard to campaign fairly, to canvass donations or hold rallies or install advertisements, it's hard to physically vote, and any irregularities or pre-existing biases in any electoral system will be even more dangerous. Most countries have a means of doing it, but they should not give this power to the executive alone, an independent elections body, widely respected, often is responsible for proposing this course of action, and the legislature is normally responsible for approving of it by cross party actions. Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, one of few types of rights that is immune from the notwithstanding clause and is one of the sections that cannot be amended by unilateral action of parliament by section 44 of the Constitution Act 1982, is that the elected legislatures in Canada have a maximum duration of 5 years (many have by statute reduced it to 4), and only by a 2/3 vote can they extend it in times of real or imminent war, invasion, or insurrection.
Mail in ballots are very controversial in America but this in part depends on the election authorities, state secretaries of state, themselves often being partisans, and also with so much at stake. A four year term and with their own party virtually certain to not support an impeachment and conviction of them and having enough votes to prevent such, for a president, and a single winner system without proportional top up seats, that's a lot to bank on. In a system based on much more inclusive negotiations for president or in a runoff or ranked ballot election for any executive president, with many independent bodies choosing important people like judges and auditors, dependent on continued legislative concurrence for policy choices and not merely the refusal of their members to try to countermand the president, and with many parties open to people and a good shot at winning in each district, with the contests there not being all or nothing, and with removal processes by recall for policy disagreements and fair trials for allegations of true misconduct or corruption, and with elections officials being independent authorities themselves, mail in ballots and electioneering in general is a much smaller risk, and thus, in any real election during a state of emergency, holding an election anyway is a much smaller risk.
In countries with multi party politics, they are capable of amazing jobs. New Zealand has been truly incredible in how they responded to this pandemic. Despite not actually having the protection of a constitution that is safe from a majority vote the way that most constitutions would be, as limits on the parliaments themselves, they still respected transparent responses and effectiveness as well as putting aside so many of their partisan differences for a common outcome. If the US had NZ's per capita outcome, it would have 1450 deaths. Of course, every death is a tragedy, but you'd be about 70 times less likely to be killed by this pandemic in New Zealand than America. A country that was truly pro-life would be greatly inspired by the way that Kiwis responded and the political and social systems by which they can have competent responses and a reason for why their parties are not as antagonistic in all this. But it was also predicated on how New Zealand on almost all metrics, was among the best countries in the world long since before the pandemic, with budget transparency bested only by Sweden, human rights being well respected, the best corruption ratings, a proportional representation system, and has also been very inclusive of the racial minorities of their Maori people in ways most countries with major racial minorities are not.
The one hundred thousand deaths in the United States so far, and the 374 thousand in the world, were mostly preventable despite how little we know about this virus and how we don't have a vaccine for it. We have made great strides in epidemiology, the H1N1 virus killed one hundred million people in just two years from 1918 on, in a world of only about 1.8 billion (proportional to today, that would be like erasing two Brazils, one and a third Americas, the remaining European Union, two Nigerias, three Russias, 11 Canadas, or one third of either China or India. Still not a Second Impact though), which was also deadlier than the entire World War One, World War Two, the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide, the American Civil War, and the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922, combined. But we don't have to tolerate what we have already done when we have much left to do.
When your kids come to you one day and ask why the world listened to stupid and corrupt leaders in 2020 and hated our neighbours, a time which was technologically capable of great human capacity and love for our Planet, which we all share without a care of nature to respect national borders, what will you say to them?
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