| May 7th, 2010 |
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So, in Australia, we have compulsory voting. Everyone eligible to vote is required to vote.
This is not universally loved, but it has strong advantages. In countries without compulsory voting, there are often extremely low voter turnouts among the disadvantaged groups of society, who are therefore cheerfully overlooked by most politicians, thus furthering their sense of disconnect from any relevance to their lives, and therefore discouraging their voting. This is bad. "Get out the vote" initiatives amongst minorities seem to attract a lot of scandal, and it's well-known that certain groups in America in particular have actively worked to suppress minority votes.
In Australia this does not happen. Everybody has to vote, which means that the Australian Electoral Commission keeps everybody on the electoral rolls as a matter of course, there are polling stations everywhere, and if someone was attempting to block people voting, they'd get caught and prosecuted. Caught because the AEC would ask the people who didn't vote why not (because if you don't vote, they ask, and if you don't have a good answer, you get fined), and they'd explain that they were prevented because of X, and the AEC would go OH REALLY and muster relevant police and judicial forces, because the AEC takes elections very seriously.
Elections take place on Saturdays, because most people work on weekdays; if you're not in your own electorate on election day, you turn up to whatever polling station you ARE close to, and you say, "Hey, I live in [area]," and they give you the ballots for your own electorate and an envelope to seal them in, and your ballots are taken to your electorate for you.
And of course, because everybody votes, they're always confident of what the voter turnout will be like, and queues are rarely very long and they never run out of ballots. (Occasionally some polling stations will run out of ballots for other electorates; they have a system for handling this, however, and ballots will be supplied.)
This is my country.
Which is why, you see, I have a reaction of total consternation to this: How is it even possible that voters can be turned away from polling booths without being allowed to vote?
This is a sign that whoever is running your elections is terrible at their jobs.
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From Nick Robinson's blog: tonight's story may be being over-shadowed by the extraordinary revelation that Britain cannot competently run the most basic part of the democratic process.
You know, in other countries, the reaction to something like this would be: "Someone screwed up. This needs to be fixed, as soon as possible." For some reason, the English - and I think it's an English thing, as I didn't make it to Wales but certainly attitudes in Scotland were very different - take an incredibly dismal attitude to failures. "See? Britain fails at this."
Where's the "What? Britain is better than this, dammit!"? Why the complacency with inadequacy, across the spectrum from train schedules to national elections?
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