The future Tibetan Parliament will have 45 members. Two-thirds of these MPs are elected by voters in India, Nepal and Bhutan based on their provinces of origin in Tibet. One representative is elected from Australia and the rest of Asia, and one representative each from the Tibetan diaspora in North America and Europe. Ten parliamentary seats are reserved for monastery schools in each region. Switzerland once hosted many Tibetan refugees, and now that a second generation of their immigrants has grown up, a Swiss Tibetan group is using an election assistant, Smartvote , to revive the Tibetan exile elections.
According to Swiss news reports, the Dalai Lama proposed his idea of democracy long before he fled Tibet in 1959, and in 1960 a 13-member parliament held elections for the first time in Dharamsala, India, where he lives in exile. Today, some 3.5 million Tibetans live in the nominally Chinese Tibetan Autonomous Region. However, only 150,000 Tibetans living in exile around the world can participate in the democratic process, and nearly 80,000 of them are registered to vote in the “Central Tibetan Administration” – the official name of the government in exile. Now that Switzerland has grown up with a second generation of Tibetan refugees, a Swiss Tibetan group is using an election assistant, Smartvote, to revive Tibetan exile elections.
This election is very important because it is the third since the Dalai Lama handed over political power to a democratically elected leadership team in a democratization process in 2011,” according to the Swiss Tibetan named Palmo Brunner, a 33-year-old Swiss Tibetan who has worked for the Tibetan exile elections held this spring The 33-year-old Swiss Tibetan has been volunteering for more than a year for the Tibetan exile elections held this spring. According to the report, Brunner’s political engagement is not party or candidate oriented, but rather opinion building: The political scientist, along with a team from Switzerland, North America and India, formed a “democracy project” association and worked with it to incorporate a Swiss invention – a smart voting platform – into the election process. The voting platform allows Tibetans in the diaspora around the world to elect the candidate whose political views are most closely aligned with theirs, regardless of their location.
The future Tibetan Parliament will have 45 members. Two-thirds of these MPs are elected by voters in India, Nepal and Bhutan based on their provinces of origin in Tibet. One representative is elected from Australia and the rest of Asia, and one each from the Tibetan diaspora in North America and Europe. Ten parliamentary seats are reserved for monastery schools in each region. There is no party system in the Tibetan government-in-exile; the political landscape tends to be divided according to province of origin. According to Brunner, “There are no traditional political parties, but there are many candidates.” Brunner explains that this is the purpose of the Tibetan Smart Vote Project’s sponsors in setting up an information base for opinion building.
“The Democracy Project really kicked off the Tibetan Smart Vote project in the spring of 2020, Brunner said, and about half of their efforts were spent creating the questionnaire. Because of the “regionalized” nature of politics, it wasn’t easy to ask questions that highlighted differences in the candidates. “We came up with a very participatory approach, calling on people to submit questions and working through them in a workshop.” The new crown epidemic added to the difficulty of the work. When the questionnaires were finally ready, mobilization was equally complicated: promoting the election platform among candidates, helping them fill out the questionnaires, and getting the message out among voters all became less easy.
According to Brunner, “Most of the people in our association are young and belong to the liberal social wing,” Brunner said, “but we don’t want our views to dominate, quite the contrary,” she said, adding that there are between the two generations But we don’t want our views to dominate, quite the contrary,” she said, adding that there are significant differences between the two generations, especially among older Tibetans who adhere to the “old Tibetan” approach. “To ensure a balance of views, we created an advisory committee that also included older and conservative members,” Brunner said.
When four students began developing this smart voting software for Switzerland 20 years ago, the message of neutrality was central. Today, it’s impossible to imagine what it would be like without smart voting software, both at the local and national level.
Swiss votes generally ask questions around more pragmatic matters-for example, in a municipal vote in Grenchen, a town in the southern foothills of the Jura, the question posed on the smart vote was, “Do you support the construction of a boat harbor?” The Tibetan Smart Poll, on the other hand, addresses some basic questions-first to clarify who is Tibetan: “Please vote, do you agree that anyone who calls themselves Tibetan must speak Tibetan?” This question was posed to Tibetans in the global diaspora; whereas if it were within a country, the question would be more polemical and ethnic in nature. Of all 37 questions, most concern how a political system should be structured; in addition, there are specific measures, such as whether the government-in-exile should establish a public health insurance system for Tibetans in South Asia.
In the national parliamentary elections held in Switzerland, the birthplace of smart voting, in 2007, more than one in ten voters used the online platform, and the percentage of users has now risen to one in five. In Switzerland, the associated “smart spider” charts (so named because they look like spider webs) are now part of every election campaign. They are printed in newspapers along with portraits of the candidates. While criticism of smart voting is almost as “old” as election testimonials, most people know that there is no substitute for political discussion on this platform. Nevertheless, a survey conducted by Politools in 2015 showed that one in seven SmartVote users used 100% of the election recommendations. Almost nine out of ten said that smart voting software influenced their decision to vote.
The platform is therefore quite effective in Switzerland, the report said. But Smart Vote is neither institutionalized nor permanently funded, says Politools’ Michael Erne: “We have to find new funding for each project.” Copies of smart voting were used in Bulgaria and Luxembourg back in the 1990s. Three years ago, Politools developed an internationally accessible version. “Since then, we have also been actively looking for partners abroad.”
Smart Vote benefits from Switzerland’s reputation for “perfecting the democratic process”. “The biggest obstacle is the lack of funding. Politools can only accept funding that is “politically neutral and independent of political parties,” which makes it more difficult to find sources of funding. “Our partners cannot have their own political leanings in the electoral agenda.” Politools works with universities or civil society groups – in this case the Tibetan Democracy Project, for example – and must be funded by foundation donations.
Through the Tibetan Smart Vote project, Brunner realized how much she herself has been influenced by the Swiss idea of democracy. “Tibetans living in the U.S. are the exact opposite; they are largely influenced by American ideas of democracy,” she says, noting that Tibetans in exile are largely similar in thinking to Tibetans in exile in India, which has the largest Tibetan exile community in the world, and to Tibetans in exile in India, who rely heavily on the Tibetan community in Britain, the political scientist says. “This cross-border interplay is very interesting to me and I hope to study it in depth.”
In mid-May, the Tibetan electoral body announced the final results of this year’s elections. More than 11,000 Tibetans participated in the election using the Tibet Smart Vote software, a staggering number. 63’991 Tibetans voted in the runoff, 4,500 more than in the election five years ago. Given the epidemic at that time, such a high turnout was certainly surprising, bearing in mind that these Tibetans in exile had to go in person to vote because postal voting was not set up.
In my opinion, we need to step up in India and Nepal; after all, we are already very strong in Europe and North America,” according to Brunner, who concluded that the project will continue.
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