Whether you regard secrecy as a right or obligation defines whether you are for or against liberty.
Rights, though, have a habit of morphing into their opposite, obligations. Victims seldom realise their loss. The most common example is ‘consumer rights’. You never hear or read an expert or bureaucrat mention that ‘rights’ in the Consumer Protection Act are really obligations. Costly obligations. For instance, consumers are obliged to buy warranties and cooling-off periods.
The effect is that consumers who prefer lower prices subsidise consumers who are ‘protected’. Compulsory warranties oblige consumers to do without used appliances and equipment or to pay substantially more than they would if ‘voetstoots’ were still allowed. The obligation to buy costly ‘protection’ is in effect a steeply regressive tax that discriminates against impoverished people. . . . .
Whether you regard secrecy as a right or obligation defines whether you are for or against liberty. It positions you in one of the two great paradigms: for or against a free society in which people are emancipated and empowered with dominion over themselves, or a controlled society in which people are subjects with someone else having dominion over them. Is the IEC irredeemably in the authoritarian paradigm?
Will the right to vote become an obligation?: Leon Louw today in BDlive published by Business Day.
Further excerpts
A DEMOCRATIC right for which people fought and died was obliterated on Monday. This caused no spontaneous outrage. Human rights activists said not a word. Journalists who demand press freedom were uncritical. Only one voice was raised in protest during the election of the Johannesburg city council’s new Speaker. A remonstrating Economic Freedom Fighter (EFF) member was silenced and his protest forgotten. When the EFF got the outcome it wanted, he, like his ‘comrades’ and everyone else, moved on as if the issue no longer mattered. Maybe it did not; maybe it was a portent of things to come.
. . . . .
When the IEC forced them to vote secretly it must have known that it was encouraging antidemocratic corruption. Noting that the ANC were allowed to vote “without interruption”, the Democratic Alliance’s mayoral candidate, Herman Mashaba, asked why they were “so concerned about how others were voting”. “Perhaps,” he mused, “they know something.”
I once had a transparent vote. My obligation in a contract was to vote for an agreed party. The only way for me to prove that I acted honourably was to show my ballot paper to the other party. The IEC ruling denies the EFF and me and you the right to prove our integrity. It reveals an ominous disrespect for fundamental rights.