Babes at the ballot box
PROGRAMME: SWISS PRESCHOOLERS TAUGHT ART OF DEMOCRATIC VOTING Educalis project stands out because of very young age of participants.
Rather than playing house or building blocks, a few dozen Swiss preschoolers line up to cast their ballots in a vote that will shape lives in the make-believe village where they call the shots.
A “citizenship project” created by three private preschools in the western city of Lausanne aims to prepare children from a young age for participation in Switzerland’s famed direct democracy featuring referendums on a wide range of issues every few months.
“The idea is for the children to learn democracy,” said Olivier Delamadeleine, head of the Educalis group that runs the preschools.
“We feel it is important to learn the right reflexes from an early age.”
There has been a growing push in Switzerland for such efforts, but the Educalis project stands out because of the very young age of its participants.
Once a week, around 35 threeand four-year-olds drawn from the three preschools gather at the group’s “village” in a wooded area on the outskirts of the city.
Some of the children play roles like village chief, nurse or police officer, wearing homemade uniforms.
“They take their roles very seriously,” Demadeleine says as one of the “nurses”, wearing a white T-shirt with a red cross over her snowsuit, rushes to the aid of a crying child who has fallen face-first into the snow.
Days in the village are spent outdoors, regardless of the weather.
Bundled up in colourful snowsuits, the children sit fidgeting on the steps awaiting the big event of the day: a referendum.
Eve L’Eplattenier, who heads two of the preschools, kneels in the snow behind a table bearing a metal ballot box, and points to a white flag with a crest adorned with a large “E” billowing in the wind behind her.
“This is your new flag,” she said, reminding the children of the first vote held in the village in November, when they were asked to choose between two designs.
As then, the children recently received an envelope in the post with voting material identical to what adults receive before each popular vote in the country.
This time, the children were asked to decide how they would prefer to vote going forward: by placing an X next to drawings illustrating the current secret ballot vote system, or by a show of hands.
To help organise the voting, L’Eplattenier calls up two girls, Olivia and Layla, who are wearing hand-painted T-shirts on top of their snowsuits identifying them as the village chiefs.
They hand out the sealed envelopes with the ballots the children had filled out at home and each child manoeuvres one of the secret votes into the ballot box with mittened hands.
Afterwards, five children and three adults go into a small shelter usually used for meals that now sports a poster declaring it the “vote-counting office”.
Seated around a large table, L’Eplattenier explains how to open each envelope and place the ballots in two piles.
Then they carefully count each pile together: 19 votes for hand-raising and 17 in favour of continuing with secret balloting.
“Hand-raising won,” Layla tells the children.
They take their roles very seriously