Only citizens should be allowed cast their vote in secret
South Africans don’t seem to mind if their public representatives sell them out in private. Since the Joburg mayoral election, much horror (or glee, depending on your loyalties) has been triggered by the fact that two or more DA councillors voted for ANC candidate Geoff Makhubo, to make him the new mayor.
The DA said it plans to probe the “treachery”, but conceded it probably will be unable to find out who voted for the other side as the ballot was secret.
That is about as close as anyone in the political class came to questioning the fact that public representatives are allowed to cast votes in secret. The media and citizens seem to see this as entirely normal. Nor did anyone comment on the obvious irony. A couple of years ago, when Jacob Zuma was president, it was all the rage to call for public representatives to vote in secret. This, we were told, would allow ANC MPs to buck the party leadership and support a no-confidence vote on Zuma, something they were afraid to do in public. Now we see that secrecy can be used to the ANC leadership’s advantage.
One reason for the silence could be that the chorus that demanded a secret ballot in 2017 know they can’t complain about it being used in the ANC’s favour now without contradicting themselves. But this is unlikely, no-one in the mainstream debate is embarrassed by anything they say. Parties that were prepared to go to court to demand a secret ballot in 2017 see nothing shameful in criticising some DA councillors for using secrecy to vote against their party’s candidate.
So, the likeliest reason is that the people who tell us what to think still don’t understand that democracy is shredded every time public representatives are allowed to vote on anything in secret. The reasons for this have not changed since they were ignored in 2017. If democracy is to work, citizens need a secret vote because they are speaking for themselves alone and must be free from pressure that might force them to vote in a way someone else wants rather than the way they choose. But public representatives do not speak for themselves — they speak for those who voted for them. And so, for democracy to work, those for whom they speak must know what they say on their behalf.
This is why in other democracies knowing which way a representative votes is important: it tells the people who voted for that person whether they are doing what they were sent to an elected council to do, and to reject them next time if they are not. There are no exceptions. So, the practice here for presidents, provincial premiers and executive mayors to be elected by secret ballot does not mean it is democratic. It simply means that established practice allows elected representatives to ignore the people who voted for them when they choose candidates for these posts.
Representatives may vote against the party line because their conscience tells them to. Or they may do it because they have been promised goodies to swing an election. But voters don’t know what the reason is because we don’t know who voted for whom and so have no way of judging their motives.
Secret ballots are therefore great for politicians. They can use their crosses to doublecross and no-one is any the wiser. But they are terrible for citizens because they lose the control over elected representatives that they are meant to have. It is surely time voters demand that their representatives take all decisions in public so that they can be held to account.
REPRESENTATIVES DO NOT SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES — BUT FOR THOSE WHO VOTED FOR THEM
● Friedman is research professor with the humanities faculty of the University of Johannesburg.