The voting machine: The material culture of polling stations in Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda
Willis, Justin
The voting machine: The material culture of polling stations in Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda - 2017.
87
Elections are characterized by different public performances of order that are enacted during campaigns and the bureaucratic processes of the polls. This paper explores a key element of the latter; namely, the material culture, and associated processes, of the polling station. It does so by looking at change and continuity in polling station practice in the post-colonial period in three African countries: Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda. We argue that the colocation and technical combination of multiple items and processes have created the polling station—ideally, though not always in reality—as a bureaucratic machine, which helps to enact a particular relationship between the state and the individual citizen. In so doing, the polling station helps to create the state as a distinct entity and sphere of order, even as it creates the voter as the subject of that order. However, while polling stations are designed to produce an ideal of unmediated citizenship, practice and experience often subvert that ideal, and suggest that the state—instead of being a distinct sphere of impartial order—is profoundly entangled with society. As a result, while the polling station remains a powerful classroom, the lessons that it teaches are inconsistent and contested.
The voting machine: The material culture of polling stations in Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda - 2017.
87
Elections are characterized by different public performances of order that are enacted during campaigns and the bureaucratic processes of the polls. This paper explores a key element of the latter; namely, the material culture, and associated processes, of the polling station. It does so by looking at change and continuity in polling station practice in the post-colonial period in three African countries: Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda. We argue that the colocation and technical combination of multiple items and processes have created the polling station—ideally, though not always in reality—as a bureaucratic machine, which helps to enact a particular relationship between the state and the individual citizen. In so doing, the polling station helps to create the state as a distinct entity and sphere of order, even as it creates the voter as the subject of that order. However, while polling stations are designed to produce an ideal of unmediated citizenship, practice and experience often subvert that ideal, and suggest that the state—instead of being a distinct sphere of impartial order—is profoundly entangled with society. As a result, while the polling station remains a powerful classroom, the lessons that it teaches are inconsistent and contested.
Réseaux sociaux