Part 2: Broken Delegate Election System - blogger advocacy makes it business as usual

Ok. The pundits have been investigating it and it seems that the magic number in Quebec is 10.

No, not Guy Lafleur, I am talking about the 10 delegates that were reportedly earned by the Chairman from one of those Abitibi ridings in Northern Quebec with only 2 votes cast. One pundit also suggested that he had even uncovered the names of the 2 Liberal voters - allegedly Pauline and Jean-Paul Martin (no known relation to anyone known or unknown).

If we were to agree that the four stages of collective decision making are: (1) agenda setting; (2) policy design; (3) policy implementation; (4) evaluation, this issue considered by some to be really wrong took us from the agenda setting stage to policy design ever so briefly.

When the breaking news hit, bloggers were so shocked they were skeptical. After all, a claim from out of the blue that a frontrunner had earned 14 delegates (I stand corrected for the drop 14-10 but it was very fresh news) with 2 votes in one rural riding seemed implausible. This anomaly in democracy was met with a rash of comments, mostly anonymous. Most suggested this was wrong without revealing their identity and couple others were quite upset that this had been raised on Liblogs.

Curiosity Cat and others were getting quite creative when it came to alternative delegate election systems.

However, after Thanksgiving weekend and a lot of turkey, it may have died as an issue.

Why? One answer is that there are those who seek to both patrol and control the blogs. Sometimes this is done by devoting alot of time to advocacy threads and comments on other peoples' blogs. There are also those who try to muzzle the discourse with threats and name calling.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that these visitors are the blogging world's answer to Duplessis' Henchmen. Those who buy into to pure advocacy are best at law and sometimes politics, in spite of the fact that objective criteria trumps blind advocacy every time. I presume these anonymous critics are amongst those associated with the machines - because they have the most to gain from the current broken system- que bono, still. After all, whether they are being paid to blog (cyber wardens of political blogging space) or because they could be paid later through rewards (patronage) it is still blind advocacy. However, those sensitive to resilience of objective criteria will know deep down what is tolerable and what is not acceptable in a leadership contest, in spite of the patrols that profess otherwise.

When it comes to electing their guy, even when the rules that are being broken to the point that it is embarrassing for the party, these cyber wardens patrol Liblogs to be sure nobody dares challenge their candidate or the tainted process being used to get them elected - no long term agenda setting, minimal policy design musings, no policy implementation and no need to evaluate. Should Liberal policy not be subject to the same process used to create successful public policy? Or, with Liberals, is it more about using Liberal policy process to "control the outcome"? Quo bono from that?

Is their goal is to also ensure that Liberals do not pay attention for very long to the atrocious violations built into this process to elect our new Liberal leader? Is it really true that there is such apathy to what is right and what is wrong? Are Liberals so caught up in their candidates that they cannot lend their voice to fixing up the process and fixing up the party?

If this essential step is missed this time around because of Liberal's individual self-interest, the demon will rear its ugly head at the time. Are we going to let this important issue fall off the Liberal agenda?