Are you going to vote or spoil your paper?

[Harleyman]

It's nothing to do with been anarchistic, the issue boils down to trust, if they fail to engage the electorate then this the fault of our MP's and concillors, not the general public.

 

If everyone was like you and either didnt vote or spoiled the vote then no party would win. What would happen then? Would the queen take advantage of the situation and seizing power return the realm to an absolute monarchy?

[Harleyman]

IMO there ought to be None Of the Above option, and if NOTA wins then another election is called and none of the original candidates can stand again.

 

You wouldnt mind the cost then?

[Green Web]

If everyone was like you and either didnt vote or spoiled the vote then no party would win. What would happen then? Would the queen take advantage of the situation and seizing power return the realm to an absolute monarchy?

 

If everyone was like me then i would vote becuase it would make a difference

[Green Web]

You wouldnt mind the cost then?

 

Much smaller cost to have relection and have someone half decent, instead of the corrupt naff cllr's and MP's which we have in office now.

[anywebsite]

I'm not so sure about that: what if you have a good candidate in a carp party who has the good sense to ditch the party?

Should they be allowed to stand?

 

I think they should be allowed to stand again if they want to, but it's not a very sensible idea to stand again if they've just lost to 'nobody'.

[Harleyman]

That may be how they do it on your side of the pond, but over here they we count votes properly.

 

Oh really? So a Labour candidate gets 10,300 votes, the Conservative gets 8,300 votes and there were 3,000 spoiled votes counted. What the hell use is that to anybody but a giant waste of time?

 

It only indicates that a percentage of the voters were disenchanted and in the grand or order of things who gives a damn?

 

The Labour candidiate takes his seat and the business of politics go on. The spoiled votes go into the shredder and the spoiled voters live to bitch and moan another day

[onewheeldave]

By voting blank you're adding to the turnout figures without actually voting. You're making the election look more legitimate than it is. It's less of a protest than not voting.

 

A 20% turnout looks worse than a 40% turnout with half of the papers spoiled, they hardly ever mention how many are spoiled, unless you're watching the result live you'd never know. Turnout figures are more widely announced.

 

Not to me it doesn't. Many others feel the same way. As pointed out before, the blank slips are counted and, that number has to be announced and recorded. Many currently the figure isn't bandied around that much other than on the live result- but, there's plenty of 'anti-current-political-system' groups that can easily publisise those numbers.

[esme]

There seems to be some confusion over what a spoiled ballot actually represents.

 

Some people think it's a protest, it might be to you but it's certainly not counted as one.

 

I just posted this over in the none of the above thread but I think it's worth quoting here

We had this discussion in 2009 and people insisted that spoiled papers were counted as a protest when they weren't, it got to the point where I asked the electoral commission about it and got the following response

Thank you for your email to the Electoral Commission.

 

The number of spoilt ballots (technically known as rejected ballot

papers) is recorded, but that it's impossible to tell what proportion of that number is intentionally spoilt by voters. The Returning Officer records the reason for a vote being rejected, and can then supply figures for each of the following categories. Rejected for:

 

A) Want of official mark (not the unique identifying mark)

B) Voting for more candidates than there are vacancies to be filled

C) Writing or mark by which the voter could be identified

D) those where the voter's intention is uncertain

E) Any paper with something unusual about it (for example it has been altered, torn or mutilated)

 

The number of spoilt ballot papers is difficult to record as a protest because there's no certain way of knowing whether a ballot was spoiled intentionally, or of recording it.

 

The Commission requires Returning Officers to supply figures for how many ballot papers were rejected for each of the reasons above and The Commission publishes the number of rejected ballot papers in spreadsheets of electoral data, which are on our website.

 

If there was a dramatic rise in the number of spoilt ballot forms at an election this would probably be investigated. Spoilt ballot papers, along with all the ballot papers, are kept for a year after the election in case they need to be looked at again. However as things stand the number of spoilt ballot forms is not seen as a protest because it is not clear how many of them are a deliberate protest and how many are spoiled unintentionally.

 

Please let me know if you require any further information.

 

Kind regards,

 

Esther Mckelvie

Public Information Officer

The Electoral Commission

Trevelyan House

Great Peter Street

London SW1P 2HW

So in 2009 spoiled ballot papers weren't counted as any kind of protest or as a "None of the Above" option, they were just counted as spoiled and then ignored.

 

Now the rules may have changed since then, but I doubt it, feel free to ask them yourself, the contact web page is http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/contact and there's a link for contact emails and addresses

So all you people who made a protest by spoiling your ballots, you wasted your time.

[Hairyloon]

in 2009 spoiled ballot papers weren't counted as any kind of protest or as a "None of the Above" option, they were just counted as spoiled and then ignored.

 

So we definitely need the NotA option then.

[esme]

So we definitely need the NotA option then.

No argument here.