Gallonmanor with a good take on the weekend voting review.
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The inside track since 2003
Gallonmanor with a good take on the weekend voting review.
Copyblogger theme design by Chris Pearson | Hosted by ENTANET
5 comments ↓
A two-day poll (Sunday and Monday), plus a postal vote if you really needed it, would cover most of the no-shows’ excuses.
Then you could make voting mandatory: if someone wanted to abstain “on principle” they could put their wallet where their principle is, to the extent of a fifty quid fine.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I’ll certainly pass it on to lots of local members.
My biggest worry from reading the document is the question about voting by internet.
I’m not worried about the security implications – I’m sure someone more technically minded than me will work out whether they are pertinent and how they can be fixed – I’m worried about it as a (minor) threat to democracy.
Anything that makes it easier for people who have particular resources to vote creates a differential between people with those resources and people without them. It’s not as simply as rich people having internet access and low-paid people not having it (since many families will see internet access as a necessary good for homework purposes, etc), but certainly the older someone is the more likely wealth distinctions will come into play in determining whether someone has internet or not.
Anything that makes it easier for some people to vote than others skews the democratic process, imo.
On weekend voting, there are a sizeable minority of people who get very easily confused if anything about voting changes. If we did experiment with weekend voting (a Sunday would make more sense, I think) then the law would need to be changed so people could choose whether to vote on a Thursday OR a Sunday – I think turnout would go down if we went straight from one day to another. Of course, if voting was split over two days, with two further days inbetween, we might need to think about how to disincentivise leading reporting on exit polls etc. Or we might just have to accept that as a given, and work to get our message across each time.
Of course, we also need to think about the needs of the council staff who work on election day – it might be a bit much for them to be expected to have two election days every year. So perhaps it should only apply to GEs?
Given that the summary does not mention it, I was amazed to see how much of the review is related to electronic voting. This part of the review I give a strong no vote to. I remember you having a similar opinion on Electronic Voting.
As for voting on a weekend, if it was done, I would expect it would have to be done over two days to accommodate different faiths.
I don’t think changing the day of voting would make much difference. It is the location of the polling stations which needs to change. The most obvious place would be in the middle of the shopping centres.
I doubt if you would ever make the “can’t be bothered” brigde turn out unless they were given the incentive of getting a freebie of some sort out of it!
Provide a decent bunch of carrots rather than sticks (fines) & confusion of variety of methods & days. Everyone who votes in person gets entered into a well structured lottery – say £100 prize in every ward, £1,000 every constituency & one or two national six figure sums.
It’s not just actual voting that’s a problem – many voters aren’t registered. Maybe the lottery plan could be combined with individual registration which reduces the possibility of postal vote fraud & voter impersonation but is feared because of the risk of Labour voter attrition…
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