I’ll Only Believe This When I Vote

Minister of Foreign Affairs Ali Shami:

“Lebanese emigrants will vote in the 2013 parliamentary elections,”

This is an impossibly small timeframe for such a logistically complicated undertaking. Moreover, the possibility for cheating is so huge since the Lebanese embassies are treated like sectarian fiefdoms.

As a Lebanese who lives abroad, I didn’t sense any action by the embassy to get this ball rolling, and ours is a very chatty embassy: The ambassador sends us text messages for every conceivable Lebanese holiday, personally attends Lebanese weddings and offers his condolences when a Lebanese dies.

In other words, if there was fire, we would have seen the smoke by now. We do have to fill something called a “family file” for the embassy’s records, but I can only assume this is a standard procedure in the African continent after what happened to the Lebanese in the Ivory coast, Nigeria, Guinea and Congo.

The larger question though is one of theory, not execution: Do the Lebanese trust each other enough to allow the results of an election where more people vote from outside of Lebanon than from inside it?