Quote of the week
Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
On regulating larghe companies
Legislators are under the sway of an army of lobbyists: Google alone spent more than twenty-one million dollars on lobbying last year; together, Google, Facebook, and Amazon spent an unprecedented forty-eight million dollars, which was an increase of seventeen per cent from the previous year, much of it to stave off regulation. (A recent tweet by the digital-rights activist and developer Aral Balkan put this in perspective, claiming that Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, had told him, at a private book event in SoHo, “I wake up every morning and I fight regulation, it’s what I do, it’s my job.”)
