Ballad of big nothing
And so, after all that, we don’t have a new government at all. Except maybe we still will in a while. Once the most popular party has negotiated with the third most popular. Or if that doesn’t work out, the second and third most popular parties have worked something out. So we could end up with a situation where the winners lose and the two main losers win. But to be fair, the winners only won by a small margin, it’s just that we measure it as a huge margin. Hmm. Yep, I think our elections work pretty well on the whole.
Plenty of people will say plenty of things about this bizarre election in the weeks to come, some of them more eloquently/informedly than me (political journalists and commentators), some of them more amusingly (Have I Got News For You and so on), and some of them, quite possibly, talking over me (certain other shows). So I’ll spare you the 16,000th blog on the strangeness of our democracy. I just wanted to focus on one small cautionary tale that emerged from last night’s often baffling events. (I’ve already mentioned this on Twitter, but like many people on Twitter, I feel 140 characters is a bit restricting for someone of my massive intellect.)
It’s about all these people who missed out on voting because of the poor organisation of polling stations. As you will have seen on the coverage – because it was repeated about every 15 seconds – quite long queues in some places were turned away. Understandably, most of them weren’t too happy about it. Some were even what you would call ‘peeved’.
Now.
Firstly, of course this is very regrettable. It’s insane that you could miss out on voting because of what the kids might call an ‘admin fail’, especially given that they have individual ballot papers for every voter who registers, so it’s hard to see how they can run out. It also seems perverse to lock up at 10pm if there are people still waiting. It’s not like there is some harsh time limit on counting up the votes: at the time of writing it’s 24 hours since the polls closed, and some of those poor tired counting people have only just gone home to bed now. It’s pretty clear that the ‘every polling station closes at 10pm’ law should have a caveat that says ‘…unless they are REALLY busy’. As one reader of this blog put it on Twitter, if you make it ‘illegal’ to keep voting open beyond 10pm, it ends up being a victory for bureaucracy over democracy. So, yes. No-one should ever be denied the vote by mere volume of other voters. It’s silly.
But. It seems to me that all those people who didn’t manage to vote fall into two categories:
- (a) People who work very long hours, and had no option but to go to the polling station at the last moment;
- (b) People who LEFT IT TOO LATE.
The most vocal frustrated voter on the BBC coverage was a good example of group (b). She was a lady in Sheffield. She claimed that she had been to the polling station at 6pm AND 7pm but been deterred by long queues. She eventually went back for 9pm, but by that time the line was too long and she didn’t get her paper. Then she got cross and shouted ‘it’s UNDEMOCRATIC’ at camera crews. Now she’s in the papers.
I’m sorry to seem petty, but if you visit a polling station twice and leave twice because of the length of the queues, then you’re not trying hard enough to vote. We all have to queue for things. I calculate that I’ve spent around 40 percent of my life waiting my turn for stuff (and by ‘calculate’, I mean ‘guess, with massive exaggeration for comic purposes’). Having to queue up to vote is certainly very unusual, but you can’t duck out of it, then come back later, find it’s too late, and get angry.
We all know that if check-in closes at 8pm, you aim to get there at 7.30. If you’re likely to turn into a pumpkin at midnight, you take the appropriate precautions at 11.45 and retain your physical form. In short, you get through life by planning ahead. If voting is as important to you as the furious people claimed it was on the news, then you don’t cook dinner and watch some TV first, you get down there at eight and make absolutely sure.
If I sound irritatingly smug and preachy, be reassured that I’ve never planned ahead properly in my life. I’m always late for things. I always organise myself badly. I am the king of leaving things to the last minute. But even I managed to cast my vote around 3pm yesterday. If I can do it, anyone can. Let’s learn our lessons from these thwarted voters and all make a resolution to do things about twenty minutes earlier than we were going to. Deal?
And if you’re one of the unfortunates who didn’t get to cast a vote: hey, it’s OK. If you live in most parts of the country, your vote wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. Funny old world.
POSTSCRIPT
…oh, before I forget. The ‘Would I Lie To You’ playoff. The answers were: I have seen Sex And The City (so that was a lie) but never a full Eastenders (so that’s truth). I have not spoken to J-Lo and would not really know what to say to her (so that one was a lie). I haven’t dislocated my shoulder (another lie, there, then – I have broken my arm three times though). I WAS fourth place in a national computer football tournament, in Gwent, when I was 17. (That was truth.) So the winner is, I think, Marie. Name your prize, Marie.
Also, I’m going to start rewarding the people who leave the first comment on each blog. If yours is the first comment, you get to request a word, theme or name to be included in the next blog. So there you go. Pretty exciting, huh! Good luck!
The answer
Posted by Knox on May 17, 2011
I am not going to go into a full blown rant about the crappy shittiness of our current voting system – it would be too long, too incoherent, and too poorly informed. So just a comment on this from Max:
“we have compulsory vote. Everyone is required by law to go and vote. For years, people have been complaining about this, because politicians gather buses of indigent people give them some lunch/wine/new shoes and take them to the voting stations where they are told who to vote for. And their vote counts as much as any well researched, informed vote.
I hope you guys can figure out a stable form of government out of this mess”
The census is compulsory – so many people i know have been receiving threats of being fined, having people knock on their doors to ask if they’ve done it etc but the vote, the thing that decides to a large degree how the country is run, is not. how does that even begin to make sense?
Also – with the queueing – postal voting all the way.
Posted by Andrew Wimble on May 10, 2010
A couple of points.
First of all I think there does have to be an absolute time when polling stations close. There are restrictions on certain types of reporting, such are exit polls, until the polls close. If some polls stayed open later than this there could be a tendancey for people to wait for the exit poll and then rush to the polling station so they can use their vote tactically. As well as distorting the result this would make the make the last minute rush even worse.
Secondly while I agree that people should allow plenty of time to vote and have little sympathy for people who turn up 5 minutes before 10 and them complain if they can’t vote, reports were that people who had queued for over an hour were being turned away. I would say that turning up an hour before (or half an hour for that matter) is allowing plenty of time and those people have every right to be anoyed.
Posted by Rachael on May 8, 2010
was it the same arm 3 times? thats unfortunate.
Posted by Emmy on May 8, 2010
I never thought I’d say this, but the British election system is weirder and more convoluted than the American one. And I thought the US ‘points’ type system was as strange as it could get.
Posted by (Magnificent) Josh on May 8, 2010
I think that it’s all very well saying they should have turned up earlier but the point is still that people who tried to vote weren’t allowed. People trying to influence their country weren’t allowed.
Also, the student segregation is literally disgusting. There is no excuse for deciding who and who does not get to vote. That’s sick. And yet we hear nothing about it on the news. We need some sort of public figure to raise the issue… but who?
Posted by max on May 8, 2010
I’ve been following this election with a lot of interest for some reason (I’m an Argentine living in Netherlands, so I shouldn’t care less)… and the one thing that struck me as really weird is that you voted on a week day.
My country has arguably the worst ‘democracy’ in the world (don’t even get me started in our electoral system) BUT we always vote on sundays, cause -you know- people are free to go vote the whole day.
Another funny thing -that illustrates the differences between cultures, and men’s ability to complain no matter what- is that we have compulsory vote. Everyone is required by law to go and vote. For years, people have been complaining about this, because politicians gather buses of indigent people give them some lunch/wine/new shoes and take them to the voting stations where they are told who to vote for. And their vote counts as much as any well researched, informed vote.
I hope you guys can figure out a stable form of government out of this mess.
Posted by Jackiec on May 8, 2010
I agree with most of you that the lady on the telly was silly for not just getting in the queue in the first place. However, the way in which we vote is so desperately out of date. Turn out was forecast to be way up (tho actually it wasn’t up that much unfortunately – but that’s another rant!) but with the current method of voting in the polling stations a lot more would have failed.
In each polling station they have only one paper copy of the register of voters. Perhaps in larger areas they share out the pages perhaps alphabetically, I don’t know, but it means a choke point in actually getting your ballot paper in the first place. Surely in this day and age (oops sounding old there!) it wouldn’t be that difficult/expensive to have a few networked computers with a shared database of voters so more people could be serviced at a time to reducequeuuing. Link it all together and have option to vote online. Hang on that also means votes could be counted more easily, cheaply and quickly. Easier voting would probably encourage more people to vote too.
Am I the only person befuddled by this?
Posted by DeborahF on May 8, 2010
I ‘tuned out’ of most of this so I don’t feel able to comment much on whose was to blame. Though I would have thought there was plenty of time between 7am and 10pm to vote.
I do have one question though. We all register to vote months in advance so the councils who organise the polling booths must know how many people are due to turn up during the day. So if by lunchtime the turnout is low shouldn’t you be expecting a bit more of a rush after work and through the evening? Couldn’t they have had more people available to distribute the papers and been able to ‘open’ more booths for people to use?
What about the councils doing a little bit more preplanning for a change?
Posted by Anji on May 8, 2010
If my 90 year old Gran figured out postal votes then why haven’t the people who work long hours and have no time to go vote etc worked them out?!
No reason to get stuck in ques, working hours don’t matter and you don’t even have to vote on the day everyone else does.
But some people live for something to moan about, a few people must be having the times of the life right now!
I walked past 2 polling stations at 9.30 ish on thurs and both looked like they hadn’t seen anyone in hours! Maybe it’ll be a case of opening more in ‘busy’ areas at ‘peak’ times. Or time slots to vote in, and if you can’t make it between 1 – 2 postal vote is the only option. I certainly think whoever gets in will be looking at making ‘changes’ to elections.
Posted by Dawn on May 8, 2010
This year I decided to do a Postal Vote and I will definately be doing this in the future!
All it cost was a second class stamp to send for my voting papers, then I filled them in and returned them in pre paid envelopes.
So, no rushing around after work:)
Posted by Rachael on May 8, 2010
(Ray) I think someone has already mentioned this but it seems to be the problem was that some people couldn’t be bothered to queue, went away and were annoyed upon their return that there was still a queue.
Firstly I thought we as a people had a rep as good queuers but that seems to me to be a poor queuing technique.
Secondly many many countries around the world (especially those we have seen fit to ram democracy down the throat of with a machine gun) have to queue for hours and hours to vote in risky circumstances. The worst that could happen to these folk is they might get cold, hungry and bored.
Finally there is always the postal vote option if your working day makes it difficult to get to your polling station.
I got excited by this news as I thought it might mean record turnout across the country, which of course it did not still only 60% in some places and I bet those that did not vote will still feel they have a right to complain.
Posted by amycool on May 8, 2010
Is it weird that I was so excited to see an Elliott Smith reference in the title?
I would love to see a queue at our polling station as both times I have voted there, I have been the only one. Last time I went straight after work and thought there would be a great rush but not one person. Perhaps next time I should go at 9.45.
I couldn’t do that of course as I am too punctual.
Posted by LisaD on May 8, 2010
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who complain that they didn’t get to the polls in time. The lady in question went three times, so clearly the problem wasn’t that she had to work until very very late and then ran over straight away. The last time voting was the blog subject I said that I cured my voting apathy by remembering what women before me went through so that I can vote, but when it seems like a pain in the ass to vote I remind myself that there are places where standing in line to vote gets you shot (Iraq for example) and people still manage to cue up. Democracy isn’t the right to participate when you feel like it. And how dim does a person have to be to think that the lines get SHORTER at the last minute? Short lines are at 7AM everyone else has to pay the price for deciding to sleep in.
To vote for President Obama I got to the polls at 3 in the afternoon and still had to wait for 3 hours (and standing outside in November in New England for that long is painful) and I live in a state that most people knew for sure would go to Obama. Did I leave? Course not! A) I wanted to be able to say I voted for President Obama and B) everyone knew California would allow gay marriage so all the people in favor stayed home and all the people against went in. “Decisions are made by the people who show up.”
Posted by Rick Procter on May 8, 2010
Here’s the thing though folks… A lot of these latecomers may well have full-time jobs to commute back and forth to and a number of kids to look after (feed, ferry to school, etc). That’s the first thing.
Now imagine for example that the grumpy lady in question had stayed at the polling station the first time, instead of trying to come back later. The place she would have taken in the queue might have saved her from missing the vote, but it would have put everyone behind her an extra space back. Extrapolating this, if more people had turned up earlier, the very same queue simply would have built up sooner, and I suspect the end result would have been very similar. If there were queues for several hours leading up to 10pm, what it means is that the polling stations were not able to deal with them quickly enough.
Now, according to comments made by Jenny Watson (good name!) on TV, the letter of the law states that, at 10pm: 1) the polling station is locked; 2) anyone still without a ballot paper is denied their vote. OK, that’s the law.
However… Many people were denied their vote despite already having queued INSIDE polling stations since 9pm. Surely, the democratic and moral duty of the balloting management, bearing in mind the law, is to do their absolute utmost to ensure that everyone present does get a ballot paper before 10pm, thereby enabling them to vote. This, in many people’s cases, is what failed to happen.
Bearing in mind that a very large turnout was anticipated, which in fact did not occur on the scale that it might have done, this indicates to me that a systemic failure occurred across the board which caused problems in a large number of locations. It is the overall balloting management system that appeared to me to be most guilty of laziness.
Posted by Sephy on May 8, 2010
Well, exactly. I’m a nurse and I worked a 12 hour day on Thursday, but I got up early to make sure I got to the polling station before work.
Posted by Sam on May 7, 2010
The biggest discrace with people not getting to vote, was not that they didn’t get to vote, but that in Sheffield Hallam one polling station segregated and discriminated against students.
They split the queue into residents and students and fast-tracked the residents claiming they had more right to vote than others.
Later on the news they blamed delays on students without polling cards, however most of them had polling cards. Often this was used to segregate them as many had the address of the halls of residence on. Also on the cards it said specifically that you did not need to take the card with you to vote.
It is a simple case of discrimination and is wrong.
Posted by Mrmatt on May 7, 2010
YES! I am 100% with you on this Mark. It is far from a shocking example of the way democracy is run. It is a shocking example of how some people just don’t plan. When one sees the places that had the problems, what does one see, they were all MAJOR CITIES!! Of course the polling stations were going to be busy, if these people had been queueing for 3 hours or so, it would be worse but it isn’t it’s just an example of not being prepared.
Boo sucks to the angry BBC woman say I! Next time, she should make sure she gets to the polling station at a reasonable time.
Posted by Kathryn on May 7, 2010
I can see myself getting competitive about the first-comment thing. I’m on study leave for the next few weeks, I have nothing better to do than check for blog updates every 10 minutes.
I got to vote twice. It was fun.
This was because my dad is blind and I did his for him, not that I committed identity fraud or anything else illegal. Although I did steal an election poster.
Posted by Rachel Winter on May 7, 2010
Quite! stop bleating and get over it.
Unless you’re a nurse say, that finished work at 9pm and legged it only to be stopped by people (who could have voted hours before) queing, then I have no sympathy.
If I, of legendary laziness can get dressed and hall myself up the road in time to vote, then anyone can.
And shouting at the staff is going to help no-one – they will spend the next week feeling bad and unappreciated, and you will go home and feel like an arse for four years until you sheepishly go back again.
Posted by Laurs on May 7, 2010
To be honest, I was less annoyed about the people who left it to the last minute to vote and couldn’t than I am with those who just didn’t bother. Like my mother for instance, who even walked past the damned polling station and STILL DIDN’T GO IN. Furious. Now if she never complains about the problems that this country faces before she next votes, I’ll be slightly less cross, however, the chances of that happening are small.
It makes me so cross when people don’t take advantage of their right to vote, even if it is to spoil the ballot…
Sorry, this turned into a rant, I didn’t mean it to. I’ll go now…
Posted by Misha on May 7, 2010
I was a bit annoyed with the complaining people myself. I knew I was going to be in school from 8-10 at least, so I made sure to go to the polling station on the way (7.15). Incidentally if you’re up at that time it’s lovely and quiet, I was the only person in there apart from one chirpy lady behind a desk.
I know i’m lucky that the nearest polling station to me is in the scout hut, which is basically at the bottom of my garden. But still, I made the time to do it so why couldn’t they? (and my level of planning meant I forgot my shoes yesterday so if I can manage it surely anyone can?
Posted by Katie on May 7, 2010
Zoe Fell is going to win this every time; that girl has some bad-ass psychic powers at her disposal.
Posted by Zoe Fell on May 7, 2010
It’s lovely to find someone so sensible out there Mark.
It’s nice to see that somebody is actually able to see both sides of the Polling Station ‘Kerfuffle’.
I did mine by postal vote to save all this hoo-hah. Although why we can’t vote on some sort of secure online…thing, I’ll never know. Or I might. depending on the next few months or so.
Posted by Chicken lady on May 7, 2010
all fair points mark. no excuses for lack of commitment. the 10pm cut-off is to stop people being influenced by exit polls which are embargoed till 10pm. you can’t have everyone running out at 10:05 and changing the likely result, just because they can. that’s anarchy, or at least a very polite, democratic form of anarchy. or maybe that is democracy. i’m not sure of anything anymore..
Posted by rachel (pandora) on May 7, 2010
i’m glad to know i’m not the only one who was massively irritated by the angry lady on the BBC!