I’ll keep mine, thanks.

Surely the type of person likely to sign up to this scheme is also the type of person most likely to vote?

As I posted over at laurie’s gaff:
Interesting concept,utterly flawed.Just how many people who are currently sufficiently apathetic and/or unregistered to vote are going to hear of,let alone register for, this campaign and then vote according to how someone (unversed with the UK political issues, let alone the constituency ones that do come into play a lot)advises?
Aren’t you just better of directly addressing the apathetic and asking them to get engaged,rather than bizarrely asking them to get engaged,but being directed by a third party?
Oh, and by the way. Political apathy can be a wholly legitimate choice. Apathy on the grounds of plain ignorance/laziness isn’t, but if it’s apathy borne of disillusionment or disenchantment, then that is a valid position to have.
Also can’t see the electoral Commission being terribly happy with ‘donating’ votes. Not that they’ve done much to stem the abuse of the postal vote system and ‘blocks’ of votes being delivered, but hey,that’s involved the big boys parties, so they’ve steered clear. This though, is the sort of thing of which they might wish to make an example and react, possibly disproportionately…

[1][2] Quite.

I think there should be a Rule on here – you have to say what you were on when you wrote the article. (In my case it was usually too much caffeine.)

I don’t like your judgemental superior attitude, which is a shame because we probably agree on a lot of points. I am 30 and will be voting in my first general election this time, but not because I am lazy or apathetic or that my vote doesn’t count – to say I couldn’t be arsed is incredibly condescending. Up until now I had low confidence in my political intelligence and was aware that my choice of vote would be close to guesswork – sure I had some idea that the tories were scum sucking pigs, but at the time I didn’t know enough about Labour (or even the specifics of how government worked) to commit to what I rightly saw as a very important choice. I was well aware that many people who were less politically aware than me would be voting – fair enough for them – but I saw it as my duty to educate myself politically before I started telling the country what was best (“the greatest evil is trying to change that which you don’t understand”).

You’ll be glad to know that I will be voting in the next general election, but I don’t appriciate you generalising about non-voting young… i’d rather wait a few years and get it right than undermine democracy by introducing a random element/rewarding cheap PR tactics by making an uninformed choice.

The Give Your Vote campaign sounds interesting, and it would be good to hear from others overseas what their opinions are – but casting unquestioningly the votes of people who don’t have any experience of britain or our political parties as your own is as silly as ticking a box randomly or believing party spin.

Aren’t you just better of directly addressing the apathetic and asking them to get engaged

Well this is what this is trying to do isn’t it?

Presumably the idea is that there is constituency of young folks who are totally turned off by the Westminster pantomime, but are interested in things like very poor people in Bangladesh. The idea is to mobilize those voters. Whether that constituency really exists, or whether this will campaign can reach it is another question. But I don’t see anything wrong in principle with the idea.

I think it is a nice idea although some folks here will just attack it because that’s what they do, they don’t come up with stuff or innovate, they just like to do nothing and watch others come up with stuff and then attack them for doing so.

Glad that ain’t my life.

As a rule, any idea that makes nice people from both sides of the bourgeois political spectrum immediately and furiously dismiss you as a mental person generally has currency, because it almost always threatens unexamined orthodoxies

Like fascism, Stalinism, white supremacism?

I think it’s good that we are being encouraged to think about people around the world when we vote. Unfortunately, when the main three parties are so bland and on many issues they are ideologically convergent, I wonder how someone in Ghana or Bangladesh would vote if they had to choose between Labour, the Lib Dems or the Tories!

So it’s a good idea – not a brilliant one, and not incredibly original because we’ve had VoteMatch in the past, as well as that episode of the West Wing where Donna accidentally votes Republican and so wishes to swap her vote with someone else.

I think it might be better to get people to think about the issues towards those countries, and rather than just giving their vote to someone there, vote for the party with the best foreign/international aid policies. Might be the Lib Dems.

As a rule, any idea that makes nice people from both sides of the bourgeois political spectrum immediately and furiously dismiss you as a mental person generally has currency

I am not a nice person nevertheless I can confirm you are deranged.

What would you suggest is the best course of action if my Bangladeshi proxy wants to vote BNP?

Laurie, do you count spoiling the ballot paper (including “none of the above”) as a vote?

ukliberty,

as I’ve mentioned before, purposely spoiling your ballot paper is perfectly legitimate, but why not make it part of a larger campaign?

Thanks to t’internet, it costs nothing to organise these days, and if large numbers of folk spoiled their ballots identically with, say, a big “NO” [much quicker to scribble than "none of the above" - anything that makes it easier, eh? ], then that might actually get noticed. Wouldn’t exactly be hard to get the media interested, either, in these news-hungry days.

More on this at me blog (where else?)
http://andyhgilmour.blogspot.com/2010/02/power-to-people.html

As for this voting-as-someone-from-elsewhere-suggests, why the hell not? It most likely won’t attract many people, but when you’ve got thousands of folk in Glasgow (and elsewhere, but they’re a soft target) who vote Labour simply because that’s what their dad did, and their grandad before them – completely ignoring what 80-odd years of Labour councils haven’t done for them…why not something a little different?

I won’t be joining it – my vote’s mine – MINE I TELL YOU!!

Pearls before “progressives”and Laurie Pennys

As in pearls before swine.
Your “guilt”will be our ruin.
You take that which is not yours to give and strample it into the mud out of ignorance.
You are the custodian of that right which was past down to you.Not the owner.
Why not just transport every British election to Somalia and have done with it.
You people are sick and should be behind bars.
When you’ve finished destroying us.And there’s nothing left worth destroying.You’ll take a quick look over you shoulder ,halk way up the gang-plank,a pause to proclaim
“What a shit hole–I’m getting out of here”.
Oblivious to the fact that both you and your warped legions were the ruin of it in the first place.
And all to quench that bottomless unsatiable pit of self-flaggelation and prancing campus
“progressive” atonement for sins that were never commited against innocents who never existed.
Talk about giving voting privileges to white,middle-class lower primates,who have worked ceaslessly to crap all over their birth-right.
What a disgusting nursery.
Go on,here’s a saw,cut the branch that bares you aloft–and as near to the trunk of the tree as at all possible.

@Daniel Hoffman(double barrel)Gill
And don’t you start with your famous(two-liner academically challenged self-righteous narrcisistic arty-farty I’m morally superior by divine proclamation feel good crap)

You people are not involved in a movement.You are involved in an orgie of self-gratification.
As one commentator recently told you.”Your so far up yourselves that its staggers the imagination”

Well, that’s todays wierdest idea. People too disengaed with politics asked to still go and vote on lines selected for them by people likely to be even less engaged with British politics (what with not living here or experiencing most issues in Britain) from countries with much shorter democratic traditions…

May appeal to some, but I’d personally suggest it was a strange principal letting people from a different country vote in our elections. If you think the principal that we affect these people so they should have a say is so important, campaign for proper representation for them, not some sort of gimmick.

There is also one little point that seriously oncerns me here. I doubt this is politically neutral, in that someone has to select the Ghanian etc who gets to choose the destination of the vote. Therefore, there is an inbuilt bias in the system, as those selected will have presumably been selected according to certain criteria, which is not in accord with the ideal here.

Interestingly, having just trawled through the site, found this gem:

“Kofi just spoke to local chiefs in Atidze, Tanyigbe in the Volta region of Ghana.

They’re really excited about the project and want to use a vote in the UK election to raise their issues – which include, among other things, expropriation of their land by private water companies.”

(http://themakingof.giveyourvote.org/2010/02/22/message-from-ghana-will-you-get-enough-votes/)

Legitmate issue, but surely not for a UK parlimentary election?

Interesting idea, and I’ll be mentioning it to my apathetic mates, but as someone else pointed out: aren’t the people most likely to use this system the politically-aware already? Granted if this has a two-page spread in tomorrow morning’s Sun or Mail then I’ll take it back… just seems like an inherent bias problem to me.
Oh and @4: I am younger than you and have voted in every election possible (general/EU/local etc) since the age of 18. It does not take 12 years to work out what the blue, red, and yellow (and “other”) parties/candidates stand for. It’s patronising of you to suggest so.

this campaign is beyond stupid. I have lived in the UK for 10 years (I’m American) and can’t vote, even though the elections affect me far more than they do someone in the Middle East or Africa. If you are concerned about bigger issues like trade and the war, you can cast your vote to speak out about such things, what is the freaking point of ‘giving’ it away? the whole idea disgusts me. People who fought long and hard for voting rights must be rolling in their graves.

One more thing: if the Powers That Be really wanted to encourage people then they’d make “none of the above” a valid option. That way spoiling your ballot would achieve something (say, if over 50% of the electorate voted ‘n/a’ then they’d recall the election with different candidates).

Oh and finally, a bit more education that people are not voting for a leader! Too many times I hear people say “oh but I don’t like Brown [etc]” even if their PCC of whatever hue is a perfectly reasonable person.

Wish list over.

Having read more of the http://giveyourvote.org site t’would appear that my concerns are unfounded, as the site is actually aimed at the politically aware, not (as I originally thought from a quick scan of Laurie’s article) the apathetic/non-political types.
I see what they’re doing and I guess their heart is in the right place but there’s something troubling about giving your vote away… are the people in Afghanistan etc going to be given a full list of candiates per constiuency? Seems like it would be easy to abuse for the unscrupulous too. Hmmm.

[17] Exactly that idea was, IIRC, adopted in Russia after the end of Communism. It led to so many recall elections that they had to drop the system. I have little doubt the same would happen here.

@19

You got a source for that? I reckon a trial of maybe one or two local coucil elections might be a good idea, I sorta hope that we have more faith in our democratic servants than the Russians, understandably, did… although “hope” is the key word!

17 is more like it …. it’s not just apathy that’s reducing the vote, even if it is a, or the main driver. In my own case, I currently have no idea who to vote for, for the first time in 27 years, and if I do vote it’ll be on the basis of “least bad”. Despite being a voting zealot, and one who votes in all elections, I can now see why so many people don’t vote.

I would do the followig:

a) Go back to printing names only on ballot papers (30 years ago, having party names, let alone logos, was regarded as shocking and condescending).
b) Remove “easy access” such as postal votes, unless there’s a serious, genuine reason.
c) Stop all attempts to increase voter participation – that’s the job of political parties, and their problem.

The above would reduce numbers further, but that’s too bad. To an extent, parties are “all alike”, at least there’s a much greater level of consensus than there was in prior to the 80s. Participation will only increase once people are interested in the issues at stake. More positively, people are now less likely to vote as per their parents, and this makes them harder to convince.

Finally, any party winning power on a very low turnout should feel at least slightly humbled and/or restricted. A popular mandate would require 5 years of proper engagement with the electorate, including 5 years of good behaviour.

#15
“I am younger than you and have voted in every election possible (general/EU/local etc) since the age of 18. It does not take 12 years to work out what the blue, red, and yellow (and “other”) parties/candidates stand for. It’s patronising of you to suggest so.”

I’m sorry that you felt I was attacking you. The idea I was trying to get across is that everyone is different – hence, you are obviously fairly sure of your ideologies/politically aware, good, we need more like you.

As for patronising, as I said – I was only refering to myself and not presuming that those younger than me were less politically aware; I was a late starter, I was just annoyed by the idea that as a result I was being labled lazy and apathetic (I was actually involved in a lot of activism from a very young age)

It took ME 12 years to work out which party I supported, and considering the events around the iraq war throwing labour into disrepute and the fact that the tories are… well, tories, I’m sure that i’m not alone.

At the end of the day you are telling me off for generalising (which I wasn’t) when that’s what I was critisising the article for.

We can’t all be political geniuses… please don’t attack me for recognising my own personal weaknesses/my lack of political confidence

#21

Thanks for that – I was starting to feel I was being labled as a fool, but i’m glad to know i’m not the only one to have been unsure of where to cast my vote for reasons other than apathy or laziness

@22

Sorry, I was being too harsh. Of course everyone should know what they are voting for and it should be easier to find out stuff about political parties/candidates (at this juncture may I recommend http://theyworkforyou.com and http://ukpollingreport.co.uk as two brilliant resources to publicise)
I’d never claim to be a political genius, much as I’d like to be, just that I’ve always had firm views. You were a late starter, I was a (boring) young starter much to the chagrin of my schoolfriends back then…

Oh and @21: wouldn’t some form of proportional representation help balance the voters intentions with the make-up of the HoC? I’d add an elected Lords for good measure too…

Oh and finally, a bit more education that people are not voting for a leader! Too many times I hear people say “oh but I don’t like Brown [etc]” even if their PCC of whatever hue is a perfectly reasonable person.

But the effect of voting for the PPC, should he become MP, is that his leader will become ours. In 1997 and 2001 we knew that Tony Blair would be PM if Labour got into power. If you really didn’t want Tony Blair to be PM, outweighing all other considerations, then you shouldn’t have voted for your Labour PPC.

Oh and @21: wouldn’t some form of proportional representation help balance the voters intentions with the make-up of the HoC? I’d add an elected Lords for good measure too…

It struck me t’other day when I heard of Labour’s ‘leaked’ proposal for Lords reform that there will be a debate about which House has more of a mandate and therefore which is superior.

@25

An easy solution around that would be to abolish the monarchy and have an elected President, like most civilised countries. I’ve oft’ wondered if the Head of State does not fall foul of equal opps leglisation, seeing as to get the position you need to be a)born of royal blood or b)marry into it.

Andy @11, the reason I asked Laurie is because she didn’t include ‘spoiling the ballot paper’ in her sermon post.

I think grandparents, suffragettes etc fought for the freedom to vote (which it seems to me includes the freedom not to vote) not the obligation to vote.

About vote and democracy:

We want Internet for Demcocracy!
Shut down the euro parliament. Now!
Check it out @ http://www.internetfordemocracy.net

Over 71,000 people have already signed!

I read as far as the end of the second paragraph before the sound of a galloping moral high horse drowned everything else out. Sorry, Laurie, but you might help your cause(s) if you try not to portray yourself as such a high-handed, patronising, pompous, overindulged sixth former.
The main reason I and many others don’t vote (last voted in ’92 in my case, Labour FWIW) is because we don’t like any of the parties that stand a chance of winning and will not endorse or encourage their behaviour by voting for them.
You’ve seen the inflated little nobodies in the HoP stand up during a debate and say ‘my constituents are rightly concerned…’ then continue to belch on about whatever has made their arse itch that day? Well as fewer people vote for them, the less they can make that claim. Not one of the candidates from the three main parties gets close to my politics, voting for the lesser of three evils is still voting for evil.

In short: f** ‘em.

I suppose I’m one of them “apathetic yoofs” who don’t see the point in voting for the three headed monster party…what do we have a say on of importance? The EU? The war in Afghanistan/Iraq? Immigration? Nothing. If I did use my vote it would be for the BNP…a little slap in the face for the liblabcon.

On election day I stay home. I don’t vote. There are two reasons I don’t vote. The first reason I don’t vote is because it’s meaningless, this country was bought and paid for decades ago. Are there any major policy difference in the three main parties that get all the campaign coffers? Second reason I don’t is because if you do vote you have no right to complain. People like to twist that around like the blogger on here. They say if you don’t vote you have no right to complain. But where is the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest incompitent people then you are responsible for what they have done. You caused the problem, you voted them in..I on the other hand..who did not vote. Who in fact did not even leave the house on election day have every reason to complain about what they have done who you voted for. So have your nice expensive election campaigns you love so much and I’m sure when you’ve all voted for the blue one in instead of the red one the country will improve immediatelyJ