The Secret Ballot

Secret Ballot
Directed by Babak Payami
How important are elections for us? Theoretically elections are the most important ingredient in a democracy. It gives you the power to elect your own government. In India election times are the most interesting times where everyone cashes in. For the media houses this is “dance of democracy” and they take it upon themselves to educate the readers about their democratic rights, candidates, the predictions, the trends and everything you never wanted to know. You have exit polls, public opinions everything all going into extreme measures to make you aware of your elected government. However do things change at your end? Or it is merely a quarterly affair? Half of the times, you struggle to decide, whom to vote for amidst the list of goons who are representing your constituency. Often some courageous journalists do react in strong ways of throwing shoes at the defence minister and manage to evict a few rotten eggs from the basket. But more or less elections are just a matter of fact for many of us.
How important can democracy and elections be at Iran? We all know that true liberal democracy did come to Iran for a short while through Mossadeq and then the saga of how U.S had played against this democracy, wary of losing its exploitative power over Iran’s resources. After that, post revolution, Iran never got back democracy in true sense. However in the Islamic republic of Iran, elections do preside as universal suffrage where you can vote above the age of 16. The supreme leader selects the representatives and the citizens vote to select their candidate. However, a theocratic nation, Iran’s government runs with the Islamic principle of “Presiding in righteousness and Prohibiting the wrong”. Hence how do they make sure that everyone makes the right choice? Simple enough, even if the candidate is selected, it’s finally the supreme leader who decides the right candidate and millions of papers and Secret Ballots are then discarded. (The recent precision of Ahmedinijad as the president over Masoudeh showed that) How are then elections treated in Iran? Do people still rest their hopes on suffrage? The supreme leader is extremely keen to maintain the sanctity of the process, to make sure that elections are held and everyone gets the right to vote.
Babak Payami’s Secret Ballot shows such an election day in a small Iranian island (actually the film was shot in the Kish island on the Persian Gulf)
It was just another day for the army guards in this remote sleepy island, till a white ballot box falls from a flying aircraft. This new artefact leaves them perplexed. Soon arrives a young girl as an election agent who has been sent to collect votes from the people on this island through the secret ballot. Initially reluctant to take orders from a girl, even if she is a government officer and later unfazed by her constant lectures about everyone should vote, the soldier still takes her around the island to collect votes. She has the ballot papers and photographs of the candidates.
The vote collection process seems to be arduous for the agent. She meets a truck full of people who have come to vote including a 12 year old girl. The girl’s mother disagrees to her rejection of the girl’s right to vote. This is because she believes that if a girl can get married at the age of 12, then how incomprehensible can voting be for her. She meets a man working on a solar energy sector, who denied to vote. He is of the opinion that only God is his saviour and he does not want to rest his beliefs of being served by any mortal being. Then there was one woman mourning her husband’s death, who retorts back saying that she is deprived of her basic right to join her husband’s funeral processing at the cemetery, voting rights mean nothing for her. Few in fact refuse to vote for the candidates, saying they donot know the candidates, have never even met them. Through these pieces of images shot in minimalistic styles in long takes, Payami wants to build a Kafkaesque notion of the election for the commoners. Through the desperate stubbornness of the election agent it seems that all that matters is the process to be conducted. The people are of less importance. However the sanctity of the process needs to be maintained, no guns should be shown to the people, they should not be bribed to vote, they should not be of a different nationality; however all these hurdles do occur at different points in time.
Conducting the elections seems to an arrogance of “doing things the right way”, one of those soul-less mechanised must dos by the government. Hence nobody seems to be concerned about what happens to this adobe hut adorned remote island and its people for the rest of the year. All that is important now is they should vote. The only logic offered by the agent that “voting is right and good for people” like so many other rules, which have been drawn since they are “right and good for people” and almost all drawn without consulting them. In fact it seems she has been conditioned to believe in that idea.
The absurdity of the whole process is revealed to the agent through a wonderful metaphor. At one point, when the agent is on her way to catch the ferry back to the city, the soldier stalls his car indefinitely seeing a red light in the middle of a desert. The agent asks him to ignore the light, since it is an fault in the system. There is no need for a signal in a desert. However the soldier is adamant that he would not violate the rule although the rule itself here is complete absurd without any traffic. This is almost indexical of the whole rule game to be a complete farce.
However still out of this whole game, the ballot box still is the most coveted fact, an outcome of the crafted process for practising democratic right justly and correctly. Hence we find that instead of the ferry, the anxious government sends for an aircraft to transport the ballot box to safe hands, where based upon the “rightly executed process”, further new rules and laws will be crafted for the people.