democracy in action!

not sure how many of you know, but ecuador is in perpetual political change....with something like 11 presidents in the last 10 years or so......the current president is trying to rewrite the constitution, with a national assembly (and local ones, too.......) i am not entirely sure how this all works, but basically to create the assembly, which will rewrite the constitution....there are over 700 candidates to pick from (no one i have talked to knows how they can possible understand who all of these folks are and what they "stand" for.....) anyway! so you have to pick 24 total national, and depending on your province another group....which depends on population/province, so in pichincha, where quito is, there are 18 more.......

you can choose by platform....groups of 14? (i think) which each have a an equal amount of men and equal amount of women.......and supposedly each of these sets also carries a nice mix of diff. political ideologies.....you are also welcome to choose independently, the 24 candidates regardless of platform "set", but the weighting of those chosen that way, is significantly less than....those chosen in clumps?????? and there are no guarantees the final assembly is gender balanced either.....

anyway, we were at a cafe the other day! and the family who owns the place was going thru all of these images in the paper.....but everyone seems to be in an utter state of confusion.....(maybe this is the point?) then.....everyone points out that potentially most of the country will just find one or two obvious people they like in each set, and just vote for that column....hmmmm......

this is happening on Sunday! interesting.......and no drinking in the country starting 12pm fri - sunday nite!!!! (when jo & i arrived in vietnam in may before some sort of elections, they also had the curfews & no drinking laws, but you could occasionally find the random foreigners wandering the streets drunk - largely ignored by the local police if foreign....but here, it's supposed to be a great time for police to crack down.....) oh, and voting is compulsory, so people are fined if they don't do it!