Tranquility Base Comic

Wednesday 26th May, 2010 @ 13:00 GMT

Oops - both sides attempting to manipulate the result just ended up evening things out (probably what the result would have been without manipulation).

I spent a long time wondering how the actual voting mechanism would work in a Colonial system like Tranquility Base's. Ultimately, I decided each colony would have a separate election and the majority winner would go forward to the overall vote.

I think (and I'm sure my US friends can correct me if I'm wrong) this is vaguely similar to the US "Electoral College" system. It's not supposed to be exactly the same, however, my system is not really based on any real life democracy - I'm not even sure it would be reliable, practical or fair.

I got the basic idea from the episode of Battlestar Galactica (Colonial Day, episode 11, Season 1) where the Quorum of Twelve elect a Vice-President. They don't take a poll of their citizens though, each Quorum member takes sole voting responsibility for their Colonial planet. They presumably bear in mind popular opinion, though, hence President Laura Roslin (who gets the deciding 13th vote) replacing her dull, but efficient, aide with Gaius Baltar as a candidate for VP.

The episode title is an extreme paraphrase (ok, just the gist) of a quote by Joseph Stalin: "The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do."