Elections are the means, legitimacy the end

Again from Tripoli:

Even in a country as small (6.4 million people) as Libya, an election is a complicated affair.  More than 2.8 million people are registered to vote.  Four thousand candidates are running for 200 seats an assembly that will write the new constitution.  Voting by Libyans living abroad started today in six countries.

This would be a difficult election to administer even with another year to prepare and an established voting tradition.  People displaced within Libya will vote where they are living, but using ballots from the communities that they left.  This means ballots from all over Libya have to be available in principle in every polling place, which greatly complicates logistics, ballot security and counting but ensures that the displaced have an opportunity to be represented in their home communities.  Assisted voting will be necessary: there are no symbols on the ballot (parties are too recent a phenomenon to have established symbols) and 20% of the electorate is illiterate.  Assistance is appropriate, unless it extends to picking the box checked.

What can a small team of 30 or so international observers hope to contribute to such a far-flung and complicated process?  They can, most directly, hope to get some idea of whether the process meets the standards set in Libya’s own legislation and in international agreements to which Libya is a signatory, as well as whether the process is conducted according to what are today considered best practices.  These standards go well beyond election day voting, counting and aggregation of results.  They include the right of effective remedies after the fact when there are complaints as well as rights of freedom of assembly, expression and movement for the weeks of the campaign.  They also include the process by which the courts blocked stalwarts of the Qaddafi regime (several hundred of them) from becoming candidates, using 21 different criteria.

In a post-war country like Libya security is particularly important.  The militias claiming to provide security in parts of Libya, and clashing occasionally with each other, are both a virtue and a problem every day.  But on election day they could play an important role, either by helping to ensure a safe and secure environment and letting people vote their minds or by aligning with particular candidates or parties to try to affect the outcome.  Ideally, they should have been dissolved one way or the other before this first post-revolution election.  In practice, that is a lengthy effort, which has begun with cooptation of some of their leaders as ministers of interior and defense (as well as absorption of their cadres into the public administration) and will have to continue in the future.

Foreigners like me are not likely to be able to detect subtler efforts to influence the voting by militias and political parties, and in any event we can cover only a few of the many polling places, none of which are in the most insecure areas.  But there are also local observers–both “party agents” and civil society representatives–who are far more likely to detect abuses.  Hopefully the presence of internationals flying the banners of EU, the Arab League and The Carter Center will give courage to these local observers.  The international presence should also encourage local election boards to try to execute their responsibilities in accordance with the elaborate procedures hurriedly put into effect.  The High National Election Commission has issued more than 100 directives.

Why do we, and the Libyans, go to all this trouble?  The answer is deceptively simple:  legitimacy.  Muammar Qaddafi took power in a coup and within the first decade destroyed whatever popular support he initially enjoyed.  Thereafter he ruled the country by fear.  He never held an election.  The National Transitional Council that took over in Benghazi after the February 15, 2011 revolt and now holds governing authority throughout most of the country feels acutely its own lack of democratic legitimacy, in addition to the shortage of state capacity needed to govern the country.  So it has proceeded, with only a few weeks delay to allow more registrations, to hold these elections, which will produce a democratically validated “constituent assembly” (to choose the committee that will write the new constitution) and government Libya has ever had.

This is only the beginning of a lengthy transition.  Apart from the oil and gas sector, which was somewhat well-managed even under Qaddafi since it was his cash cow, Libya lacks effective state institutions.  It also lacks a constitution that tells which institutions should do what.  The distribution of power between the central government and the regions will be the principal issue.  Some here would like to return to a more “federalist” structure like the one Libya had under the monarchy, where the regions would have ample powers and possibly control over natural resources.  Others see that as threatening the unity of the Libyan state and would prefer decentralization–something like the relationship our states have with counties and municipalities, with responsibility for many services delegated to the more local level.

This is one of the classic problems of distributing power in a way that enables all segments of society to feel they have adequate control over their governance and related resources.  The International Crisis Group, which is a lot closer to the situation where problems are occurring than I am, believes that militias in the East concerned about their ability to influence the outcome pose a serious threat to the July 7 elections.  Iraqis are still hashing out problems of regional power distribution, nine years after the fall of Saddam Hussein.  The Libyans will not find these problems easy to solve, but solve them they will if these elections run reasonably well and produce results that the country as a whole feels are legitimate.