John Anderson Quotes

The elections are the greatest symbol of participation and political reform.

There are ways to pursue political change. In a democracy, it's through the ballot box. There are other ways, and many democracies have many different systems of democracy.

In a democracy, supposedly we hold power by what we do at the ballot box, so therefore the more we know about political power the better our choices should be and the better, in theory, our democracy should be.

Voters do not decide issues. They decide who will decide issues.

In our form of democracy the expression of the popular will can be effected only through the instrumentality of political parties.

In England, a Majority of Citizens does not elect the Majority of Representatives.

Proportional representation, I think, is fundamentally counter-democratic.

Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage and Votes by Ballot.

The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.

We are the world’s greatest democracy but we are behind a number of other countries when it come to our voting processes… The good news is that most of these are problems are fixable.

The key is to vote because we need a vote to put the people in power that we want to represent us.

[Proportional representation is a] device for defeating democracy, the principle of which was that the majority should rule, and for bringing faddists of all kinds into Parliament, and establishing groups and disintegrating parties.

Democracy is messy. It is messy whether you've been doing it since 1789 or whether you're going to do it for the first time in 2005. The trouble with Democracy is, you hold elections. The trouble with dictatorships is...you don't.

Take it from me: Elections matter.

No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.

Elected representatives are so embedded in the basic notion of what constitutes a democratic nation that it has become indistinguishable from any other form of democratic governance.

I used to be a fan of proportional representation, but I am not at all now I have seen it in action.

Elections matter, but how much they matter depends entirely on how free, open and fair they are.

In my view what you can't argue for is a system that is neither decisive nor proportional and can be indecisive and disproportionate at the same time.

We love the ability of the people to influence the actions of decision-makers, of lawmakers and presidents to be removed from or elevated to office by the will of voters, and of the community to connect amongst diverse populations through the ballot box.

When politics is interesting, people go vote.

America has only 100 Senators for 309 million people, but Stormont has 108 members for 1.7 million.

The view that we hold in Iraq now is this - that democracy is associated with elections. I believe that elections are possible.

In America, unlike England, unlike Israel, unlike Japan, other democracies, we have elections that have staggered terms.

I think it's a pity that in many people's minds constitutional reform and PR have come to mean much the same thing.