Mimi Kennedy

Election victories increasingly depend on factors other than who votes, or tries to vote, and for whom. In 2000, the presidency was awarded by the Supreme Court, pre-empting the count of thousands of Florida votes.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.