"None Of The Above"

The local elections, for many voters, are only a matter of days away. Doubtless many will be asked, personally or by leaflet, for their vote. There are some, for sure, who vote for a particular party regardless, and nothing could make them change their minds.

David Cameron kicked off the Conservative campaign with the following, apparently not ironic, statement:-

"If you look at what Labour did to our country why on Earth would you let them anywhere near your council?"

One could well ask why on Earth you would let the Conservatives near your council after what they've spent the last two years doing to our NHS, Police, libraries, education, European negotiating rights, and economy. That's not the point of this blog entry. 

The point I want to make is slightly different. Unless you are an ardent supporter of any of the particular parties, the choice of who to vote for is not necessarily clear. You might wonder why. Surely, if you want Labour out of council or Government, you vote for the other lot don't you? You could, but here's the rub. Politicians, bless them, are but simple souls (childlike actually) in that they only see votes in terms of how it relates to them. Your vote for party X might have been chosen in order to oust party Y from power, regardless of whether you actually wanted party X at all. Party X will announce, victoriously, that they have received a powerful mandate for their policies from the electorate, when often it's nothing of the sort.

Take the next general election, due in 2015. If the current course is maintained, there will be those who will vote Labour or Conservative, and would have done, come what may. The election will be determined, as usual, by those voters horribly described by pundits & politicians alike as "floating". These are people of no fixed alignment in favour of any party. It is a measure of the mediocrity of the UK's current political stock that with a Government as unpopular & incompetent as the last Labour government, that the Conservative Party could not win an overall majority. How badly did Labour have to have messed it up before Cameron was elected outright? It's shocking to contemplate.

My proposal, albeit incomplete (and slightly tongue-in-cheek), is for the voting system to reflect a difference between a voter saying "I want X candidate" and "I don't want Y candidate". You could even have a "None of the Above" box to tick.

Some will say that this is not necessary because the options exist to not vote, or to spoil your ballot paper. It's my belief that people who don't vote currently are either completely apathetic, or they do take an interest but feel that there's no difference between the candidates. Some people currently do use spoiling their ballot paper as a form of protest, but the protest itself is not recorded as such, it's just a "spoil". I worked on the 2007 Scottish elections. Each voter had three ballot papers to mark on the day, each with a different voting system. Many people simply did not understand the instructions for some papers, especially the Single Transferrable Vote paper, and these too were recorded as spoilt. The number of spoilt papers that evening counted across Scotland was astounding, and made a significant percentage of the total ballots cast.

In my system, each candidate would have a "YES" column and a "NO" column on the ballot paper. If you want a particular candidate, you put a X in his YES column. If you don't have a specific desire for any other candidate, but you really don't want someone to get in, you put a X in their NO column. You are only allowed to put one X on the ballot paper.

At the count, NO votes are subtracted from YES votes. A vote for None Of The Above would subtract one vote from all candidates. We would then not have the situation where, to all intents and purposes, a bag of lard was elected simply because it was not the other candidate, and then the bag of lard claimed support from a majority of voters.

It'll never happen, of course. Politicians are far too self-important for that. They would far prefer to delude themselves and everyone else that a vote for them is a vote of support, not a protest against someone else. It's a shame though. I'd love to see their arrogant, smug faces when they see how many NO votes have been cast. I'd like to think that it'd make them raise their game, and stop mistaking protest for support.