...with Elections (Ep. 76)

What on Earth is Going on?

What makes an election work? Is it the technology aggregates our preferences? Is it trust that our choices will be fairly counted, that they have an impact? Is it the institutions that manage the voting process? Or is it, ultimately, the people we elect and whether or not they choose to respect the process? What happens to our democracy when these components are stretched and strained?

Ben chats with Holly Ann Garnett, political scientist and elections expert at the Royal Military College of Canada.

About the Guest

Holly Ann Garnett is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, and cross-appointed faculty at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

Her research examines how electoral integrity can be strengthened throughout the electoral cycle, including electoral management, registration and voting procedures, election technology and cyber-security, civic literacy and campaign finance. She is a co-convener of the Electoral Management Network, and contributes to the Electoral Integrity Project.

Holly Ann was an Endeavour Research Fellow at The Australian National University (2017), a visiting fellow at the Åbo Akademi, Finland (2017), a visiting researcher at the University of Sydney (2014), and a Killam Fellow at Cornell University (2009).

She completed her PhD in Political Science at McGill University (2017), where she was a student member of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship. She is also a proud alumna of Queen’s University (MA in Political Studies, 2011) and Nipissing University (BA (Hon) in History and Political Science, 2010).

Learn more about Holly or follow her on Twitter (@HollyAnnGarnett).

Mentioned in this Episode

• Episode No. 68 of this podcast, about Higher Education with Mark Sollis
• Episode No. 13 of this podcast, about the division of political power with Anthony Sayers
• Elections Canada
• Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, a book by Robert D. Putnam
• Pippa Norris, comparative political scientists at the Harvard Kennedy School
• The Electoral Integrity Project, an academic research project based in Harvard and Sydney Universities
• Episode No. 74 of this podcast, about gamification with David Chandross
• On Liberty, classic philosophical work by John Stuart Mill
• Michel Foucault (1926-84), French philosopher
• Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, a book by Eric Posner and E. Glen Weyl

The Quote of the Week

"When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it." - John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006), Canadian-born economist