A disenfanchised voter pulls a face of rage. In the background, Bill Oddie agrees.

In all the confusion about who had won, something that is easily forgotten was that one of the biggest stories of last Thursday’s election was the hundreds of people turned away from busy polling stations, unable to excercise their right to vote.

You might remember from the live coverage we gave in our liveblog that a constant theme that kept emerging throughout the night was the anger, and direct action, taken by people across the UK. We’ve tried to round up some examples of just what people did to protest the election chaos.

Perhaps the most shocking for SSY is the report that students in Sheffield faced blatant discrimination at the polls. Apparently, polling authorities decided that students were of “lower priority” and sorted them into a special queue, whilst ushering permanent Sheffield residents to the front. This led the students to hold a protest where they marched to Nick Clegg’s house and tried to post votes through his letter box. Below you can see the scenes when police were called to move them on from a polling station, and they’ve got a facebook group here.

In Hackney, East London, voters staged a sit-in to demand their right to vote, and again police were called after 150 were turned away:

And this video, from Fallowfield in Manchester, shows the over 200 voters who were also turned away:

These are just the tip of the iceberg, with reports of major problems also at polling stations in Lewisham, Liverpool and Newcastle.

Disenfranchised voters have been advised to take out legal challenges against results, but its unlikely many will be able to, as they have to lodge a £5000 deposit, which if they lost their challenge they don’t get back! Message to normal people: shut up and take it. Anything else will cost you!

No one has yet been able to give a consistent explanation for why polling stations in many different places were so badly prepared for the election. Many have said polling stations didn’t have enough staff, and have wondered if cash strapped councils have scrimped on how many folk they employed to administer the election this time round. Many officials said they were deluged by an unexpectedly high turnout. The overall national turnout for the election was about 65%, which is definitely up on the last couple of general elections, but nowhere near as high as elections used to be in the 70s or even in 1992. Others have blamed large numbers of first time voters who turned up without polling cards. You can vote without a polling card, but your name has to be checked off against the register, and some have said this took time. And if you’re using up precious time, then that obviously means you should be disenfranchised!

The Daily Telegraph and the Mail were both clear on why it all happened: the head of the electoral commission has a vaguely lefti-ish past as an activist. Therefore she must be mental!

Not after 10pm though

Few people have pointed to the obvious though: why is it that polls MUST shut by 10pm? Officials interviewed on telly on election night said that the rules are clear -- the doors get shut at 10. If you’ve been issued your ballot paper you can vote, but even if you’re inside the building but haven’t got the paper yet, tough shit.

Meanwhile, in the last lot of elections in Zimbabwe, which is often derided as an undemocratic country, the polls were able to stay open later to allow voters to excercise their rights. Why not here?

It seems that electoral authorities were used to elections like 2001, which had a historically low turnout, and it hadn’t occurred to them that as the UK faces economic meltdown and the election of a government prepared to carry out brutal class war against its own citizens, people might just care a bit more about voting.

But the actual mechanics of polling day weren’t the only scandal of this election. The issue of changing the voting system has shot up the political agenda now that the Lib Dems, who have always made it their main thing, hold the keys to power for the next government. But there’s already been a bit of electoral reform in the UK. The problem is that it’s been done in bits and pieces by political parties all haggling over which system would suit them best. So there’s now loads of different systems for different bodies, and it’s confusing as fuck. If you don’t believe me, I challenge you to make sense of the next paragraph:

Westminster elections for MPs still use the old, undemocratic system of First Past the Post, where you just vote for one candidate who you want to win. Local council elections use what’s probably the most democratic system, Single Transferable Vote, where you can vote for a number of candidates based on your preference: 1 for your favourite, 2 for the next and so on, meaning you get to choose a few different folk you’d like to win. Here, we use the Additional Member System for the Scottish Parliament, where you get two votes, one for a local constituency which uses First Past the Post, and one for a regional party list, a different kind of proportional system from the one used for councils, where you vote for a party, not a person. In London, they use another system again for electing the London mayor, again with preferences.

Confused yet? You and a whole bunch of other voters! This last election may have seen thousands of voters lose their vote because it was declared invalid at the count. The reason? Because they used the wrong system, and voted for several candidates when they should have just picked one, or vice versa. In England, people were voting for councils and MPs at the same time, and were expected to know the intricacies of both systems. If you made a mistake, again, tough shit. The same thing happened in the Scottish Parliament/council elections in 2007, when a staggering 140,000 ballot papers were declared invalid, and those that cast them lost their vote! Basically, unless you are a total election nerd, there’s a good chance you won’t get a voice in the UK “democracy”.

Then there’s the scandal about the abuse of postal votes. Police have confirmed their looking into potential abuse of the system in London, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale and Bolton. There’s been persistent allegations that allowing postal votes on demand potentially allows dominant members of a household (generally a man) to deprive their families of a right to a secret ballot. Many have claimed that rules put in place by Labour that puts postal ballots in with normal votes at a count were in fact designed to make it harder to investigate how postal ballot abuse benefits the Labour Party at elections.

The political system of the UK is far from democratic. We don’t really have a choice in which party gets to form the government, as they all fundamentally agree on the need to give big business whatever it wants. They’re all funded by rich donors. The media excludes any kind of alternative voice. British governments can take us to war without consultation with the power of the crown.

We’d like to see a radical overhaul of the whole system, and the introduction of direct democracy through things like participatory budgets. But before we even go that far, there’s a few basic things that need to get sorted out about elections as they stand. We need one, democratic system for electing representatives. The best thing to do would be to implement the Single Transferable Vote for all elections, and then fund a massive advertising and educational campaign about how it works, something which just wasn’t done, so most folk didn’t know about it when it came in for council elections. Polling stations should let everyone who comes vote, regardless of what time it is: if they were queuing up before 10pm, it’s not fair they get disenfranchised.

Oh, and btw, while we’re at it, let’s extend the right to vote to 16 year olds, who are old enough to go to war, but not elect the government that sends them there under current laws. And lets get rid of the undemocratic system of forcing candidates to pay a £500 deposit in order to be allowed to stand: it’s blatant discrimination against folk who have no money but want their voice to be heard.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.