Voting

[tinyjo]

Last night, they were talking about voting as I lay in the bath listening drowsily to Radio 4. About the drop in turnout and the plans to revitalise it using postal voting, and possibly text message and online voting in the near future. Before I go on to ramble about my thoughts on this, I've got a poll for you to fill out.

[Poll #216990]

See whenever I listen to one of these pieces there seems to be an underlying assumption that the reason people didn't vote is that it's too difficult for them somehow. They can't cope with dragging themselves all the way to the polling booth. And I'm sure this is true for some people. It's just not true for any of the people I've talked to about their non-voting*. And no-one ever quotes the statistics, making me wonder if there are even any. Perhaps they just don't support the "it's too difficult" thesis.

To cap it all, I'm pretty suspicious of some of the alternative means of voting that have been suggested. There doesn't seem to be any way for me, the voter, to be positive that my phone number has been stripped from any text vote I make for example. At least at the polling booth I can make a visual check that there's no identifying marks on my slip. The same goes for online voting as there will have to be a way to authenticate me as me before I cast my vote - otherwise I could potentially vote several times or vote online and then at the polling booth later. Even postal voting has its risks - after all, I could easily collect and complete Alex's vote before he's woken up enough to notice it - although it is now pretty well established as an alternate means to vote. The risk is of a different nature here though - there's more possibility for electoral fraud, but anonymity is still preserved. The trouble is, no-one gives us the details. Trials of text-message voting and online voting have been postponed for the moment, but it's not an idea that's going to go away, because the politicians will do anything rather than believe that we just don't want any of them.

*If the BBC are allowed to draw sweeping conclusions from vox-pops of about 3 people in the street then so am I, damn it!

Comments

[alasdair.livejournal.com]

I believe that voting should be an act of endorsement, not a settling for the lesser of evils, and thus, will hapilly vote for someone when presented with a candidate I feel I can endorse, which no politcal party in my area was bothered to provide me with, and wrote something to that effect on my ballot paper, thus spoiling it, in the knowledge that the candidates are required by electoral procedure to look at every spoiled ballot. So I put all the effort I could into making my voice heard, but didn't actually put an X in a box.

[karen2205]

I'm not keen on the idea of complusory voting at all - the right to choose *not* to vote is as important as the right to make one's selection between the candidates on offer.

However, if there was a proper RON option - which resulted in nominations reopening if it won, a specific 'abstain' option, no penalty for spoiling one's ballot paper and the right to campaign to encourage others to one of the above three things (seriously - in one country (I think it was Germany) someone was sucessfully prosecuted for encouraging others to spoil their ballots, and even though completing ballots like that was perfectly lawful, it was unlawful for him to encourage others to do so) then I could just about live with it.

My tuppence, as SF's mayoral election is in a dead heat

[applez.livejournal.com]

Generally speaking, often the results of an election are such a foregone conclusion that I find I have to vote mechanistically, or along oppositional party lines. Rarely is there a true choice or true dead heat challenge, as is now available in SF.

So, for the first time in a long time, I find I really have a choice, and it is difficult to decide. One candidate has all the right political connections, but I am unsure that he'll do anything substantive (moreover his cosmetic ideas may do more harm than good) towards the challenge of chronic homelessness in the city; meanwhile the other candidate has some good idea, but a poor record of action whilst in a victory, is likely to face such strong Democrat opposition as to be rendered utterly ineffective.

So at this moment of greatest choice and importance, I find little choice at all. If I had the hutzpah I might follow the logical conclusion and just as well run myself. ;-)

[shepline.livejournal.com]

Did they mention changing the day of the election? In many other countries they operate Sunday or Weekend voting - maybe that would encourage people to vote. If they bring in different means of voting, could they also allow people to choose the location of their polling station (as long as you are voting for the right constituency you should be able to vote in any constituency - or is the just too difficult administrationally?

[xencat.livejournal.com]

Personal opinion. Vote! Always if you can. If you don't like the candidates then spoil your ballot paper. It is noticed and it's the only voice you have. If everyone who whinged about voting not achieving anything and that's why they didn't vote, voted, you could do some real change.

But in the end I go with Ken Livingstone "If voting ever changed anything they'd ban it".

Voting reform!

[damiancugley.livejournal.com]

Compulsory voting works fine in countries that have it but I don't think you could get away with introducing compulsory voting now in a country with so little civic spirit as the UK.

The more people decide they will fail to vote as some sort of vague 'fuck you' to the politicians, the more party-centred the politicians become because only party loyalists bother to vote.

oh joy! a post about my job!

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

the various solutions being worked out to authentication and anonymity are the main plank of what's being offered by the various tech firms working to fulfil the projects

They did trial voting by interactive TV, txt, post and online (both from PCs through a web interface and through voting booths) somewhere in the UK recently -- unfortunately, people liked it, and said it would make them more likely to vote than having to go out to a community hall and vote. I say unfortunately, because it's obviously (no, really!) a bugger to implement.

Apparently one of the things they liked was that people would not see them, not as they voted, but as they were going in to vote. To them, it represented an increase in privacy.

If you're interested in e-democracy issues, the do-wire e-democracy list is the key email update --
http://e-democracy.org/do , and the Hansard Society http://www.hansard-society.org.uk/ are involved in a lot of the UK's research.

voting

[pne.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure whether I'm eligible to vote in the UK. I'm British, but have never lived there, so that's likely to throw a spanner into the works as they couldn't allocate my vote to any one constituency.

I'm not too fond of online or, God beware, email voting; from what I've read so far, it's too insecure. (See, for example, reports about machine voting in America recently and how sure they are that things can't get forged.)

I haven't thought about voting much, probably largely due to the fact that I can't vote in general elections here, either, but I don't think that compulsory voting is going to do much good. I can imagine that it will result in more people voting for fringe candidates.

I'm also not sure whether people find the physical process of casting their vote that difficult; I imagine that most people who don't vote either (a) can't make up their minds about whom to vote for or (b) don't care either way.