C. Roy ReynoldsI AM CONVINCED that one of our favourite preoccupations in this country is playing ring games. However serious an issue might be, we can be depended on for reducing it to a ring game.
Take for example this issue with Mr. Peralto and the voting machine. We have heard all sorts of arguments for and against but the real heart of the matter is yet to be addressed. We seem to have great difficulty in what the Americans describe as 'cutting to the chase.'
Whether or not Mr. Peralto has legal claim to the system is not the important thing.
The important thing is how this ownership real or imagined fits into the letter and spirit of the reform system.
Let us examine the situation. The paranoia about the voting system is largely JLP-induced. Nobody should be crazy enough as to think that everything had been well with the system, but it was only after the JLP seemed to have made losing elections a favourite pastime that the demands for extreme and super-expensive gadgetry become so strident and uncompromising. Since then we have spent a scandalously absurd amount of money trying to meet the demands.
Now along comes equipment which we are being asked to finance at still more cost. And guess what, it is claimed by one of the principal participants in the search. Is everybody so dumb that they can't see the automatic conflict?
As they say: the perception is the reality, and there is bound to be the perception that if you design a system you are likely to know how to manipulate it. Forget any suggestion that some systems are so fail-safe that they cannot be manipulated. If such you seek you ought to join the seekers of the holy grail or the golden city of El Dorado.
Cannot Mr. Peralto and his party understand that regardless of how well his system functions some people, many people, could get the notion that its greatest asset is enabling elections to be decided not by the laborious process of bogus voting but electronically manipulating the process.
In other words the suspicion could surely arise that we have moved bogus voting into cyberspace.
I have no way of knowing whether or not Mr. Peralto's claim to authorship is valid. The fact that he was not known as a trained expert in the field does not in my view automatically disqualify his claim. There was a time in this country when innovation was not thought to be the exclusive province of the formally tutored. So if he was able to design the system all power to him. It would be a good blow for thinkers and tinkerers in this country.
But the insistence upon his ownership and control is in my view tactless and dare I say, tacky. Honour is best bestowed not commandeered. If Mr. Peralto's claims are valid then the honour should be allowed to become a natural outgrowth.
But the whole ring game, if anything, points to the absurdity we have been pursuing with regard to the simple process of voting. To me the follies of the age are the amounts of scarce resources we have spent on FINSAC and electoral reform by gadgetry. This is where the Electoral Committee ought to have been faulted. The members should have had the savvy and courage to have told the country just where reasonable reform stops and absurdity begins.
As I understand it a canvas of the world stage revealed that there was not in existence the type of gadgetry we sought. It was then that they had the responsibility to say to the country that what was being demanded does not exist, and not spend millions of dollars chasing a shadow. Or alternatively, they could have informed us of Mr. Peralto's genius in this field and that they are banking on his performance. Equally if they had entered into partnership with him, and that the agreement was that we should provide the money and he the brains we should have been kept informed.
We have now been told that some of the 'independent' members of the committee had not been in agreement with the course Mr. Peralto advocated and thus we are entitled to wonder if this lack of co-operation could have been at the heart of the JLP's demands for their replacement. Under such circumstances the whole thing becomes not a conflict of interests but a war of interests.
Now that the Governor-General has been handed the 'mare's nest' the best possible outcome we could hope for is that he fires the whole shebang 'in the national interest'. Then of course we would end up with a whole new Constitutional ring game.
"Ring around the roses, pocket full of posies. Ashes, Ashes, we all fall down!" For the whole thing to me is reminiscent of the European plague of the Black Death to which this little ring game applied.
C. Roy Reynolds is a freelance journalist.
