No Vote, No Voice

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On the 10th of June, all of the UK will be voting in the European elections, and Londoners such as myself will also be voting in the London Mayoral elections.

A new blog has been set up to encourage people to vote. I heartily second that. If you don’t vote, and someone you don’t like gets elected, you have no right whatsoever to complain.

I may or may not reveal who I’ll be voting for in a later blog post. I’m certainly not going to say now, as it would defeat the point of this one – whoever you are, and whoever you support, make sure you plan to use your vote. (In my view, the electorate should get more of a say on policy than one vote every few years, but it’s all we have, so let’s make it count.)

4 thoughts on “No Vote, No Voice”

  1. “On the 10th of June, all of the UK will be voting in the European elections, and Londoners such as myself will also be voting in the London Mayoral elections.”

    You also get to vote in the Greater London Council elections (twice, none the less). And some of the UK will also get to vote in local council elections.

    The weblog is about a nice idea but would have been better had it launched before the deadline for registering to vote. I personally registered after seeing those TV adverts with the hand-drawn guy who “doesn’t do politics”. I wanted to register anyway but figured it would be more difficult than it actually was, possibly involving phone calls to the Council (and I had enough of that when the Council employed bailiffs to recover a Council Tax debt owed by a previous tenant of my flat).

    So, yes, I will be voting.

  2. “If you don’t vote, and someone you don’t like gets elected, you have no right whatsoever to complain.”

    But I can’t vote against someone, I have to vote for someone. I’d like the option of casting a negative vote, say against the BMP or someone else I’d really hate to get in, but not have to support one of the samey other candidates. And what if I want none of them? I can’t vote for RON, or if I simply don’t care I can’t tick a box to say abstain. You’d think after a few hundred years voting systems would have advanced to contain such features

  3. I’d like the option of casting a negative vote, say against the BMP or someone else I’d really hate to get in, but not have to support one of the samey other candidates.

    So what would happen if there were five candidates, and 100% of the electorate voted for “not the BNP”? Who would get the seat?

    You’d think after a few hundred years voting systems would have advanced to contain such features

    In terms of voting for RON or abstaining, several have, I believe. It’s just that we don’t use any of them here in the UK. :-(

    Gerv