Engaging with the democratic process
Jun. 4th, 2009 07:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slowfoxIt's polling day for European elections (Hull doesn't seem to be doing local elections today), and so I set off to vote before heading to work.
Initially, it rather looked as though I was too early: 'POLLING STATION', proclaimed the sign, chained to the school gates, which were locked, because the yard was, in fact, a building site. This was a little surprising, since this is the usual entrance to the Polling Station (they take over one of the infant classrooms for the day), and there weren't any diversion arrows to deflect aspirant voters to the correct entrance.
Anyway, I was on the bike, so I flitted around to the other school entrance which, thankfully, was open, and yay, my voter card was exchanged for a ballot, and verily did I doth vote.
The ballot itself was dispiriting reading: a list, in alphabetical order, of mainly negative parties (BNP, UKIP, Anti-EU Democracy, etc etc), and there were only two parties there that I didn't immediately reject on principle.
Then came the conundrum: do I vote tactically, or do I vote on principle? The tactical vote would have been Lib-Dem, the principled would have been Green. Feeling that gaming the vote to ensure that the party you don't want can't possibly win isn't really how democracy is supposed to work (absenting myself from the reality-based community for a moment), I decided that I should vote with my convictions, and voted Green.
Initially, it rather looked as though I was too early: 'POLLING STATION', proclaimed the sign, chained to the school gates, which were locked, because the yard was, in fact, a building site. This was a little surprising, since this is the usual entrance to the Polling Station (they take over one of the infant classrooms for the day), and there weren't any diversion arrows to deflect aspirant voters to the correct entrance.
Anyway, I was on the bike, so I flitted around to the other school entrance which, thankfully, was open, and yay, my voter card was exchanged for a ballot, and verily did I doth vote.
The ballot itself was dispiriting reading: a list, in alphabetical order, of mainly negative parties (BNP, UKIP, Anti-EU Democracy, etc etc), and there were only two parties there that I didn't immediately reject on principle.
Then came the conundrum: do I vote tactically, or do I vote on principle? The tactical vote would have been Lib-Dem, the principled would have been Green. Feeling that gaming the vote to ensure that the party you don't want can't possibly win isn't really how democracy is supposed to work (absenting myself from the reality-based community for a moment), I decided that I should vote with my convictions, and voted Green.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-04 08:23 am (UTC)Ours was deceptively simple - we have one vote, and mark the form accordingly. The arcane, complicated stuff happens once all those single votes are collated, whereas I suspect your system has you doing all the complicated stuff in the first instance.