Elections and Knowledge of the masses

Elections and the accompanying results always amaze me. 

In the evolutionary game - can't believe somebody thought about giving everybody a piece of paper, and asking for their opinion on who should be their leader. Somewhere somebody tried this,  it worked and viola - we are in a world where a lot of countries boast about being democratic by passing around pieces of paper every 5 or 6 years. I am sure this is a very recent evolutionary trend, and yet to be seen if it will survive the tides of time.  If it indeed is an optimal solution, it is unclear why we haven't seen many public corporations conducting elections of employees to decide their CEO (..voting among share-holders is not necessarily same).

We have to assume a few things for democracy to work:

1. there is an easy way to conduct fair elections
2. participating voters are rational 
3. voters think as a collective, and vote for the long-terms interests of this collective (goes back to point 2 above)
4. Assumption that majority opinion is the best opinion

Unfortunately, lot of these assumptions don't hold true for most of the elections.

When some of these assumptions go wrong, elections are: 

• won by leaders who buy votes (literally distribute money and buy votes or introduce welfare programs that appeal to the majority), intimidate voters, create divisions in the society (religion, color, class, caste come into play)
  
• won by a small section of the society who know how to engineer the public opinion (The Clintons, Bushes, Gandhis of the world)
• won by people who know how to engineer the voting machinery (hijack polling booths, rig elections, manipulate people through newspapers/radio-tv stations)

And I clearly see some of these being played out in the recent election of the biggest democracy in the world. 

I also think lot of current democracies in the world are ruled by a few select political families - and the illuminati conspiracy theories may not too far from the truth.  It will be a  good topic for a social scientist to look at the facts and prove this wrong. 

Here are a few examples I have in mind: 

• Nehru-Gandhi family ruling India for the ~50 years of since its 60 years of independence. The fourth generation of Gandhi's (Rahul & Priyanka) are waiting on the sidelines now. Independent India - under this family - became one of the most corrupt nations in the world, and is still one of the poorest in the world
• Bhutto's ruled Pakistan for most of its democractic existence (even though democracy came in patches to Pakistan) - now 3rd generation claiming their power
• The others include Bushes, Clintons, Kennedies in US, Sukarnos in Indonesia, Rahmans in  Bangladesh - and we covered more than 60% of the world population.

While having these strong political families bring some semblance of stability to the democracy of these countries, it is surprising how these political families kept their grip on power over such periods  in democratic elections (>50 years, 4 to 5 generations) - even after their sub-par governance. Possible, humans are genetically wired to follow - and only few understood how to capitalize this inherent human characterstic. Possible - all that literature on leadership - is a waste of paper it was written on.

I am not suggesting that democracy is bad - but I feel elections need to  evolve to reduce some of these issues - or in the long-term, it can affect the human evolution (a bad leader for China or India can make zombies out of a huge percentage of the human-race, and can have a significant impact on the human evolution).

If I have to write the constitution for a country, at the least I would like the following codes for an  election:

• Make sure only people who know the value of their vote can participate in an election
• If you get elected, nobody in your immediate family (sons, daughters, spouses, parents) can contest for elections (for some reasonable time-limit)
• You can't contest an election if you already won the past two elections
• People who can engineer polls through power, intimidation, money,  etc. can't contest elections (way too many rich people & criminals own the democracy these days - and another trend is to buy newspapers/tv-radio stations for coming to power)