Microstory 1470: The Transition Continues

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Since 2100, the city of Aljabara had not gone more than five years without holding an election. Most of these weren’t fair or legitimate, but they did take place, and those who the government decided were worthy of casting votes were free to do so. After the fall of the Republic, there were a lot of decisions that needed to be made in order to sustain the Provisional Government, but these weren’t determined through formal votes. They were polls. A special committee formed which did what they could to understand public opinion, and then used the general consensus to form policy. But no woman alive today had been free to cast a real ballot on Durus, except for Ecrin. The year 2165 was meant to be the time to do that, but this temporary governmental body wasn’t quite prepared for it. The greatest number of people ever, by a huge margin, would be voting in this round of elections, and no one around knew how to handle that. Even the visitors from Earth who had always been part of a democratic system didn’t know how to organize it, because none of them had experience in that field. They did their best, and tried to include everyone, but ballots were lost, or miscounted, or damaged, or people weren’t registered correctly. It was a huge mess. They would have remained in the transitional period even if it had gone smoothly, because no one had written a new Constitution...because no one knew how. Even so, it was a requirement for full-fledged governmental recognition, according to a recent poll. So new people were elected into leadership positions, and new committees were formed to make decisions, but nothing was official, and not everyone recognized the authority bestowed upon certain people from the votes. No one knew whose ballots were counted, and whose weren’t, but people whose preferred candidate lost tended to believe that their voice had been ignored. However close to accurate as it might have managed to be incidentally, no one was completely happy with the results, since it was so unclear. People began to protest, and demanded a revote. Few people were against this happening, except of course people who were still, or now, in power. It didn’t start a war, but the whole thing might have collapsed in a few years if something wasn’t done about it. Fortunately for them, a threat was on the horizon that galvanized the people of Durus into action, and finally forced them to form the Democratic Republic. But until this was official, the people lived under something called the Salmon Battalion Military State.