compulsory voting?
I just voted. I had to walk around Springfield Lane looking for the primary school (nursery section) in the heat carrying my super-heavy Beanies bag full of textbooks/flashcards/randomness. I eventually found it, with a bit of s struggle. I had a bit of a discussion should we say with S at school yesterday who disagreed with voting being a duty. I told him it was. He didn't agree! But it SO is!! Isn't it? Marcel Berlins in the G2 yesterday agreed with me:
"They (crititcs) claim that we have a right, in a free society, to abstain from participating in the democratic process. We don't. What we've got is a duty as citizens to play our part in shoring up democracy, just as we have a duty to the criminal justice system to sit on a jury".
Yep. I think so. I didn't want to cast my vote, because it wouldn't do any good and to be honest I don't feel like voting for anyone right now. That's my fault though - I should have found out about my local MP and candidates, but am too lazy, like the rest of the country...
"They (crititcs) claim that we have a right, in a free society, to abstain from participating in the democratic process. We don't. What we've got is a duty as citizens to play our part in shoring up democracy, just as we have a duty to the criminal justice system to sit on a jury".
Yep. I think so. I didn't want to cast my vote, because it wouldn't do any good and to be honest I don't feel like voting for anyone right now. That's my fault though - I should have found out about my local MP and candidates, but am too lazy, like the rest of the country...
posted by jennywren | 4:12 PM
1 Comments:
Voting is a duty, but not something that we should be forced to do. At the moment the majority of people who vote have some idea about who and what they are voting for. If it was made a legal requirement then people would be voting who have no interest or idea and then the election results would become more like a lottery. The best way to get people voting again is to find ways of engaging people with politics.
Unfortunately our democratic system is a real mess. Nobody trusts any of the politicans and the party policies are beginning to blur together making it harder to make choices. Also, voters are wasting votes by using local and European elections to make protests at the national government. How can one truely complain about the state of their local area if they haven't voted on local issues at local elections (and similarly for Europe)?
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