Foreign Perspectives

The shifting voting in England (which passed by the rest of the UK) and assorted issues at the polling stations have left everyone with the feeling that they’ve been living through the nightmare that is a third world style election.

Already we have seen the queues of people lining up outside polling stations and being denied their right to vote. Or rather, denied their right or being granted it depending on the whim of the senior election official in the polling station in question. Some allowed everyone in the queue in, then closed the doors and worked their way through those inside even running after the official closing time. Others went to the other extreme and closed the voting boxes at the closing time. Let’s not forget that those making these decisions are part-time and very junior officials at best which would make it even more ridiculous if that were possible. However, those errors weren’t confined to the junior ranks as the senior officials were responsible for not ordering enough voting forms thus a number of polling stations simply ran out and thus voting stopped at that point regardless of the time. Let’s not forget that there wasn’t a massive turnout so this was a very serious error and one that makes it clear that in fact not everyone really has the ability to vote: a 100% turnout couldn’t be handled as they don’t print enough voting forms. Finally, there’s even the prospect of a £750 a head compensation payment for those that couldn’t vote which makes me wonder a) where on early the money to pay 40% of the adult population £750 each would come from (about £12 billion in case you were wondering) and b) have those lawyers proposing such a payout even considered the effect on voter turnout next time around? My bet is that should that £12 billion get paid out, voter turnout next time would be close to zero.

Now we have moved even more into the third world style as the resident dictator (ie Gordon Brown) refuses to give up power regardless of the result of the election whilst the electoral mandate of the majority coalition is, for the moment, ignored. To be fair, it would be something of a problem if he were to step down before there were some obvious successor but it does have a very third world feel to it.

Had there been the posse of international observers present as in “real” third-world elections, they’d be asking some serious questions now… How can it be that polling stations can close when a serious number of people are still queuing outside? How can it be that who gets to vote and who doesn’t in such situations isn’t fully covered by voting rules and is instead at the whim of a junior official? How can it be that a party that has clearly lost can remain in power for an extended period of time?

If this were a third world country, there’d be calls for a rerun of the election and I for one don’t see why that shouldn’t be the case here.