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In America we had an election in the middle of our civil war. We had elections on time and on schedule no matter what.
And so we expect others to hold themselves to the same standard.
This is an irrelevant argument. It is as relevant to the current situation as a point than ancient Athenians had elections during Peloponnesian War. A better (since more recent) parallel is the suspension of elections by UK during WWII. It is definitely easier to conduct elections before the age of bombers and missiles hitting your polling stations.
However, what matters is that elections are suspended during the state of war according to the Ukrainian Constitution. Lifting the state of war would be criminally stupid when there is an ongoing war (the state of war allows some actions that are illegal during peace, like having a firing positions in private property by the military). Surely, there can be some legal trickery, like rolling suspension of state of war or some other legal tricks but this will not make it any more democratic that what it is now and there is still a matter of missiles raining from the sky. I would not like to see a headline "Presidential elections conducted in Ukraine. 25 dead, 150 injured, and 25,000 ballots destroyed in fires".
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The South was not included.
Also postwar political violence in the South meant that the 1876 Presidential election could not be counted. Hayes was not chosen as POTUS over Tilden as the result of votes being cast and counted, but because a botched Democratic scheme to bribe the neutral chair of the Electoral Commission led to him resigning.
The US elections that happened in the worst security situation were the 1862 midterms. I haven't found any detailed account of how they were run.
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Somehow didn't stop them from getting Virginia's permission to split in half! American democracy is truly incredible.
Vae victis.
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The election in 1864 explicitly excluded the seceded states / confederacy, which is exactly what the previous post was talking about. You would consider it fully democratic for the Ukraine government to hold an election only in regions under full control of the Kiev government, then?
no, but at least it would be like the election in 2019 which brought the current government and Zelensky into political office originally
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Certainly a lot more reasonable compared to “no election.”
I fail to see how holding elections only in the part of the country that isn't guaranteed to vote wrong, implicitly signing off on the rest, is "a lot more reasonable" than suspending elections.
It's especially funny to see people suddenly care about the legitimacy of Ukrainian elections despite normally acting like their elections, along with any elections that aren't the glorious USA true freedom elections, are worth nothing.
I think the payoff is that it slightly expands the options of the Ukrainian public (that is, the portion of the country that would get to vote in the election).
They could conceivably be against the war and vote out Zelensky, an option which they don't really currently have: the press is censored and the country is under martial law, speaking out publicly to overturn Zelensky is probably pretty dangerous.
If they just vote Zelensky back in with overwhelming approval, then things end up exactly as they are with elections suspended, but we at least have the information that their heart is still in the fight, that they had the opportunity to back down in a secret ballot and chose not to take it.
Of course, this is dependent on the elections being conducted fairly, which may not be the case. But if Zelensky holds an election and rigs it/intimidates voters/whatever, that would just put him in the same position he is right now, but with the added risk of information on his actions leaking out.
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