As though the Arab countries did not have enough crises, issues of dispute, and suffering due to misery, ignorance and tyranny, the electoral seasons come to inaugurate a new affliction to be added to the existing ones. In principle and at the implementation level, elections are a peaceful mechanism to regulate the authority and its relationship with society. They are held periodically to ensure the ability of the voters to have their say in regard to the performance of the officials and the peaceful rotation of power. At the same time, they are a mechanism used to identify the public opinion's inclination in the event of a major crisis. It is in that sense that popular voting is resorted to in all the countries relying on democratic systems – the main foundation of which is the elections – to rearrange power or exit a political crisis. At this level, it would not do the authority any harm and would not reduce its legitimacy if it rules with a majority that does not exceed 51%, as it would not harm the opposition to oppose with a minority reaching up to 49%. As it was said by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, democracy is “the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried,” and what renders it so is particularly the respect of the electoral process and the results produced by the ballot boxes. However, in our Arab countries which rely on public voting, they –forcibly- introduced drastic changes to the elections' task. It thus became an opportunity to renew the legitimacy of the existing regime, even if this requires the amendment of the electoral laws, instead of being a mechanism allowing the peaceful rotation of power. It also became an opportunity to create a new crisis affecting the way the authority is being practiced, instead of being a solution to pending problems related to this practice. Secondary or tactical data may change from one country to another in the process of depreciating the purpose of the elections, but both the authority and the opposition are in agreement over this depreciation. This is due to the fact that the ruler cannot settle for less than the continuation of his power and authority through the use of all the state components which are supposed to be neutral, while the oppositionist cannot settle for less that assuming power, regardless of the size of representation and the means used to secure this representation. The experiences in Morocco and Algeria – for example – may not be identical to the ones in Yemen or Bahrain, while what was witnessed in the Jordan elections was not repeated in Egypt and the results of the elections in Lebanon were not the same as in Iraq. Still, in all the latter countries, the voters found out that their votes did not have a major impact at the level of moving toward what is better, and that the electoral process rather constituted an occasion to widen the gap between them and the authority and increase the crisis of trust which already prevailed among them. However, in addition to this affliction, which is linked to the elections in general, two new tasks for these elections were created in Lebanon and Iraq, namely the imposition of the participation of the minority in the rule in Lebanon, and the monopolization of power by this minority in Iraq, all in the name of national unity and the participation of all the political components. In such cases, the voting process becomes purely folkloric, in light of the negation of its purpose as a mechanism allowing the majority chosen by the voters to govern, while if the minority wishes to participate, it can do so based on the program of the majority and not based on its own. This intentional distortion of popular voting, transformed the government which emerged from the elections in Lebanon into a caretaker government, and forced the Iraqi government to wait for many months after the elections were held before being formed. In other words, it generated governments in crisis before they even started to perform their tasks. In countries such as Egypt and Jordan, this distortion led to the exclusion of wide popular factions from parliamentary representation, thus generating doubts surrounding the results of the elections and the legitimacy of these results, and paving the way before upcoming crises.
