The Polling Station As Market Site: Political Theology, Mundane Technology, and the Possibility of Organizing Politics As a Market
Recent STS-inspired studies on the construction, operation and contestation of markets seem to have overlooked a key driver for the marketization of modern life, namely the organization of popular politics around a competition for votes, which is a characteristic feature of democracies. Like in markets for products and services, the competition for votes requires the existence of material infrastructures, which in turn equips market participants with the very ability to take part in that market. In the case of democratic politics, this means of course the existence of polling stations, ballot papers, voting machines, election booths, punched cards and enumerators. Although a lot of literature has focused on the problematic impact of mechanical and computerized voting systems, especially in the United States, it is often overlooked that the vast majority of democratic balloting that is taking place globally today still relies on much earlier technologies for the governance of politics as market, such as the uses of small balls thrown into boxes (hence the name ‘balloting’), the importance of curtains to ensure secrecy, and the use of indelible ink to prevent identity theft and fraudulent double-voting.
This paper analyses the political, moral, and perhaps even theological underpinnings of the technologies and material infrastructures, both high- and low-tech, that is needed to make the market for votes function at the place where most votes are cast: the polling station. Such an analysis highlights how the current moral crisis of democratic legitimacy is also one of its techno-material infrastructure. As more and more citizens show themselves to be disaffected by the system of periodic elections and demand more continuous flows of opinions between electors and elected, both governments and industrial suppliers of electronic voting systems struggle to come up with technological solutions to these demands. This technological conventionalism has its roots in essentially moral views about the legitimacy of the voting process: although citizens desire and are able to use technology to make their voices heard more often than just at ‘official’ election times, it is the secret ballot of the individual vote which is seen as the only legitimate valuation mechanism in the market for politics. The polling station with its high- and low-tech devices functions as the physical manifestation of this valuation mechanism.
The polling station also allows us to view the problem of legitimate valuation through the perspective of political theology. For example, the secrecy of the individual voting booth has been likened to the mysterium of the confession box, that is the booth used for the sacrament of penance. Both the voting booth and the confession booth are practically identical in design. The quasi-religious and sacralized nature of the voting booth clashes with the way people as voters today engage with the material infrastructure of the ballot-casting process. For instance, the number of people who take pictures of the votes they have cast and then distribute them on their smartphones across social media has risen so sharply that election officials have pondered the idea to ban smartphones from polling stations. In New Hampshire, the taking of such pictures or the posing of ‘selfies’ with completed ballot papers has been made illegal. Behind these concerns are powerful emotions which view the act of voting as sacred and the taking of pictures as an act of profanation. The sacralization of individual choice in secrecy is corroborated by the fact that while the use of smartphones is now heavily restricted, election officers are not allowed to deny people the ballot paper even when they are visibly drunk or under the influence of drugs.
This viewpoint clashes with another, no less theological, approach to democratic decision-making, namely public acclamation in crowds. In such situations, the requirement of secrecy is purposefully shed in favour of making oneself heard (literally) and joining others, either by raising hands, by hand-clapping or by using one’s voice. The form of democratic valuation in this scenario equally requires mundane technologies (voice and hands; and ears to record the outcome of the crowd’s will) and material infrastructure, based on signaling devices and voice amplifiers, such as megaphones. For Carl Schmitt, the original thinker of political theology, acclamation was the ‘original democratic phenomenon’ (1927), an idea recently taken up again by Giorgio Agamben and by thinkers of the Occupy Movement.
Looking at the struggle between these two forms of voting, secret and individual versus public and crowd-based, it is interesting to note that the former was once seen as the future by those who were looked upon with suspicion by the powerful elites. The first complete design for a polling station and a mechanical machine which allowed the casting of individual votes in secret, using small balls, was published by the Chartist Movement in 1838. Today, the same moral impetus that once carried forth the Chartists expresses itself by rejecting the ballot-box system, the secrecy and the individualism of the regular polling station. Public acclamation of the political will expressed by the crowd began its life as the favoured valuation process of radical elements during the dying days of the Ancient Regime, became adopted by the political Right (Schmitt) and therefore shunned as a form of political quietism by thinkers like Habermas, only to be recovered again as an alternative by the New Left of the Occupy Movement. Following the recent socio-material turn in economic sociology and applying methodological approaches developed in the field of valuation studies, this paper takes the reader back to the origins of mechanical voting machines in the early-modern period, but focusses on current innovation mechanisms and industrial-governmental exchange processes that characterize the world of electronic voting machines and online electronic voting systems. Throughout the paper, the moral, political and indeed theological ideas that are embedded in the devices, technologies and objects that make up the polling station as a site of exchange and valuation will be at the heart of the analysis.