Voting with a taste of decay

Voting with a taste of decay

Voting is one way that people choose who gets all the power without using any sort of violence. It's a way to select someone who the people believe has both the skill and mind to lead. Although sometimes it just becomes a beauty show where people just pick who looks the best and sounds the smartest out of the other candidates. It could goes as far as kids just raising their hands and saying ‘’yeah that guy looks good’’. So one must ask himself, how does voting affect who gets the power? The answer is that there are many different ways to vote that lead to different outcomes.

The voting situation in Lord of the Flies by William Golding is very easy compared to other ways of voting used nowaday. A simple raising of hands for the one that should lead the boys who have no adults there to lead. The obvious person to lead is Jack, because he was the leader of the choir and he is older than most of the boys on the island. But there's something about Ralph that makes everyone vote for him instead. The narrator says, ‘’While the most obvious leader was Jack. But there was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size, and attractive appearance; and most obscurely, yet powerfully, there was the conch.’’ (22). The boys voted for Ralph off his appearance that gave off a more powerful leader than Jack and because he held the conch that rallied them all together which they turned into a symbol of power.    

Having an anonymous ballot makes a vote possible for people who aren’t comfortable with others knowing who they voted for. It takes the stress off of people’s shoulders by having a ballet that nobody knows who voted for who. For example, the American voting process has a voting system called secret ballots. This is what people normally use to vote without their information being shown outside and personal info compared to other voting systems. Some states like the United States do this as well like United Kingdom, France, New zealand and Australia. ‘’The voting boxes are required to be of certain dimensions and closed, the only aperture being a small slit at the top.’’ by the encyclopedia Britannica which provides lots of information on different voting and political things. Though the box method has changed a little since then, but the box method is still used in certain places like school. Nowadays we use computers that have tarpes around them so people can’t see who your voting for and have questions like, what do you support? Does this law seem fair?. This style has made the Box method much more anonymous and stress relieving than ever before. If the boys had a type of voting method like this they wouldn’t have so much guilt on their shoulders and feel bad about that guilt.         

Elections can even be persuaded by fear of some sort. There are many types of fear that make people vote a certain way. A fear of corruption, a fear of invasion of privacy, or a fear of losing freedom can make a voter feel very stressed about who they should vote for and even cause some chaos. Jack uses the fear of the beast to have the boys vote for him to be chief instead of Ralph, and tries to make the boys believe that he isn't afraid of the beast when in reality he is just as scared as they are. But he doesn’t show it, so they believe in his words and think he truly isn’t afraid of the beast. To turn the boys to his side he starts by stating they hadn’t caught the beast that night and Ralph called the hunters ‘’no good’’. ’’The next thing is that we couldn’t kill it. And the next is that Ralph said my hunters are no good.’’(126). Then he tries to make him look worse by saying that Ralph said they were cowards. ‘’Ralph thinks you're cowards, running away from the boar and the beast.’’(126). To top it all off he uses the dislike of piggy to unite the boys to choose a new chief. ‘’He’s like piggy. He says things like piggy. He isn’t a proper chief.’’(126). After trying to turn the crowd against Ralph, he holds a vote to see who still wants Ralph to be chief. It backfires because everyone felt awkward at how serious he was and the only response was silence. Angry he runs away from the group crying from the embarrassment. The way he tried to turn the boys is very similar to how some candidates will take things other candidates had said and twist it to their favor. They will even go as far as to use dead voters to increase their votes or mess with the voting system by increasing their votes and decreasing their pants.          

So does voting affect who gets power? Yes. Different voting systems can lead to someone getting the power and making the rules. Whether they got it fair and square or cheated and blackmailed their way to the top, the type of voting and types of candidates affects who wins and who loses. But as the story goes on, and things start to get crazy, voting starts to lose its purpose and the boys start to split into two different tribes that focus on different things. Lord of the Flies is a good example of different types of tactics that people will use to get power. Everyone starts to careless about what the others think, which leads to a big conflict at the end. This decides who truly leads the island, and who really is the sore loser. Over the course of time, things change for better or for worse. But people start to see things clearly as the problems start to show themselves and things fall apart some problems take time to sort themselves out or people will unite to fix a problem.  

Work cited

1. Golding, William Lord of the flies. New York: Penguin, 2006