Ballot
Ballots are votes cast in an election contested by two or more individuals or
parties. By extension theballot boxis the box into which the votes are put, and
to ballotdenotes the process of voting. There are many different kinds of voting
procedure (seevoting systems). In modern democracies ballots must be cast
in secret and an effective and impartial machinery must be established to
prevent any tampering with the ballot (seeballot-rigging).
Ballot-rigging
Ballot-rigging describes any fraudulent, illicit or underhand interference with
the voting procedure, the intention being to falsify the result or to make sure of
electoral victory in advance. It used to be common in many countries, but
systematic attempts to eliminate corruption have generally been successful in
most Western states. In 1960, during the US presidential election, there was a
strong suspicion that illegalities had occurred in connection with the ballot in
Cook County, Illinois; and Chicago’s mayoralty election of 1983 also witnessed
attempts to inflate the number of eligible voters by false registrations. Allega-
tions that some voters were prevented from registration in Florida surfaced
after the US presidential election in 2000; the dispute surrounding the result of
the election in that state made the allegations more significant. Similarly, after
the Spanish general election of 1989 a number of irregularities were reported
and the court rulings on these results were particularly momentous owing to
the narrowness of the socialist party’s majority. In Ireland there is a saying ‘vote
early, vote often’, referring to the alleged custom of personation—the illegal
casting of the votes of people on the electoral register who have died or moved
from the district. (See alsogerrymandering.)
Baltic States
The three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, share a common history
of suppressed nationhood, having been largely under either Tsarist or Soviet
Russian control since the 18th century. There was one brief period of
independent statehood for each of them, between 1920 and 1940, but they
put up no real resistance to Soviet annexation in 1940, faced with the
alternative of subjection to Hitler’s Germany. However, despite concerted
attempts by Soviet regimes to destroy separate identities and indigenous
culture, all three states managed to keep their languages and culture alive,
and were among the first to grasp the opportunities presented by Mikhail
Gorbachev’spolicy ofglasnost.This is perhaps even more remarkable in
view of the population movements imposed by the Soviet regimes. Not only
did deportation by order of the Soviet government and wartime deaths reduce
Baltic States