A final reason from the Northerner for turning out today. There's fun and interest and effectiveness in using more than the primitive single X
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Should people be forced to vote in elections? Photograph: Alamy
The polls for Police and Crime Commissioners have been open all day but debate and reluctance to vote will persist until they close at 10pm. Here is one more reason from the Northerner for why we should bother to turn out.
The case against doing so has been made very eloquently on threads to the many previous posts we have carried on the issue, with regular commentors such as tiojo arguing convincingly that abstention or spoiling the ballot is a positive as well as a superficially negative act.
Our monthly diarist on volunteering on the North York Moors and among asylum-seekers in Leeds has gone as far as showing us her own spoilt ballot, and earned herself a slot on ITV in the north east in consequence.
But here's another ballot paper – the pro forma you should have got in your bright pink leaflet about the elections, and it shows an interesting thing. As Helene Mulholland explains in the Guardian here, this a preferential voting system. And we should do everything we can to encourage these.
More than one choice. Hooray! After university and before journalism, I worked for the Electoral Reform Society for nine months which left me in no doubt whatever about the wasted potential which has come from the UK's long, long attachment to the simple X-vote. To be empowered to vote 1,2,3 (and more in the full single transferable vote system), or even just a first and second X as in the PCC ones, is to discover the extra power available in the ballot, for which our ancestors fought so hard and so long.
Preferential votes tend to be discussed in terms of the results of the proportional effect they produce; so we get empirical arguments about the perils of weak coalitions or enabling an unpleasant minority to break through to Parliamentary or other representation. These are interesting, but every unhappy experience can be matched historically by successful outcomes, as indeed is the case with X-voting.
More interesting to me, having run STV elections for trade unions as well as used the system myself in various societies (where its value in giving a say to all sides is very widely appreciated), is the full power given to each vote and the interest and political sophistication which it encourages in voters. The PCC elections are a classic example. There has been a lot of interest in independent candidates, especially. With today's first- and second-choice system, we can vote first for an independent and second for whichever party political candidate we prefer, knowing that if the independent does badly, our second choice vote will still play a part, rather than being wasted like a simple.
There are many other variations of that example and I won't go on about the point, because it is straightforward. I would only add that having watched the progress of preferential voting at a full STV count for local elections at Belfast city hall, where surplus votes and those of the least popular candidates were redistributed in successive counts, I have never seen a fuller or more accurate example of the people's will being translated into representative democracy.
