Spoilt votes are exactly that, and nothing more

Victor

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2091-993234,00.html

The Sunday Times - Ireland
February 08, 2004
Comment: Brenda Power: Spoilt votes are exactly that, and nothing more

Well, the early indications are that the €4.5m cost of teaching us how to use the new electronic voting system was money well spent. We can only stand in awe of the mighty advertising brains that came up with the idea of showing us what buttons look like and reassuring us that, since we’ve already got our heads around the problem of pushing a doorbell, we have hardly anything to fear from the electronic voting system. (No more paper. No more pencils on strings!) runs the ad copy in breezy brackets, whisking away the comfort blankets of our familiar habits to replace them with scary, shiny, newfangled gadgetry. And so, it seems, the contribution of the pencil on the string to shaping voting trends is set to pass, unmourned, into history.

Gone, for ever, the sense of security and prudence and wise husbandry you felt when you grasped that little stub of tethered pencil in your mitt. If they were tying down 4in pencil stubs for fear of misappropriation, after all, this was surely a system you could trust to account for every last ha’penny of tax revenue. A system that cherished every small pencil in the state equally could certainly be relied upon to do the right thing by its most needy children. And, since the boundaries within which you had to mark the ballot paper were so strictly circumscribed by means of a length of hairy twine, no doubt the zoning lines on the national ordinance survey maps were overseen and delineated with equal precision. A pencil in every polling booth, a chicken in every pot — these, no doubt, are the very principles upon which a democracy is founded.

But now, alas, a soulless button is to replace the pencil on a string. And, thanks to the ingenuity of the advertising campaign contrived to allay our fears and anxieties about the new system, we have figured out that we will cast our votes by pressing it. No more scrawling a strong, assertive number nine beside the name of the candidate you really, really didn’t fancy, secure in the knowledge that you weren’t breaking your promise that you’d give him a vote. And no more spoiling your vote by casting your first preference for that sainted saviour of the boring ballot paper, Nun of the Above.

And, if you never treasured that little pencil on a string up to now, never appreciated its critical role in the democratic process until too late, then take note — it’s not the only thing you’re losing as a result of this new system that you probably didn’t value much either. Until the row broke out last week, I must confess I never realised I had a sacred and constitutionally guaranteed right to spoil my vote, one which the men of 1916 specifically numbered on their wish list for a new republic, one which the miserable subjects of every tinpot dictatorship heartily envy. After years of covering election counts, I fear I had formed the mistaken belief that people who spoilt their vote were largely idiots. Having seen at first hand, when the ballot boxes were opened and tipped onto the counting tables in the RDS, the monumental pig’s ears that some people made of the simple task of writing the numbers they learnt in baby infants into a series of little boxes, I reckoned most vote spoilers were lamebrains. Not because they were registering a protest, not at all, but because this was such a limpwristed, ineffectual and typically Irish way to go about it.

Writing “Dustin for taoiseach” probably seems like an absolutely hilarious stunt when you’re all alone in a small booth with just a ballot paper and a pencil on a hairy string for company. But when it is one of dozens stacked in the spoilt votes pile at an election count, the joke tends to wear a little thin. And putting an X beside the name of three separate candidates — and quite forgetting that the counters, alas, have no real way of divining the order in which you marked them — never looked particularly clever to me. Even more pitiful than the efforts of these well-intentioned citizens to exercise their franchise, though, were the attempts of the endangered politician to argue that a skull and crossbones scrawled on a ballot paper could really constitute a number one vote for him. A few years back, when the European and general elections were held on the same day, some inspired voters began their preferences on one ballot paper and blithely continued them onto the next. Which left several would-be TDs in the difficult position of trying to argue that a number five could actually equate to a number one in the absence of any other marking. And oh, how we s******ed at George Bush and his hanging, pregnant and dimpled chads.

But now it turns out that all these vote spoilers were really concerned citizens making a considered protest about the calibre of the candidates on offer and they’ve been up in arms all week demanding the right to continue doing so. One caller to Liveline insisted that the option to spoil your vote was one surefire way of getting the politicians to sit up and take notice, that a volume of spoilt votes made them beat their breasts and thump their craws in contrition for having presented such a miserable line-up to the discerning electorate.

Off-hand, though, he didn’t seem to be able to point to any notable success of the spoilt votes tactic. There were, it appears, some 21,000 votes spoilt during the last local and European election poll. Not much sign so far, though, that the parties are suitably chastened by that figure, or that we can look forward to choosing from a sterling line-up of multilingual Mensa members in every constituency next June.

Our political masters most likely concluded that only a handful of those vote spoilers would have seen it as a means of communicating their displeasure with the crew of candidates on offer and, even then, that they deserved to be ignored for choosing such a wimpy and pointless way of going about it. And, of the bulk of the 21,000, it would be fair to assume that they went out with the intention of casting a vote but ended up making a complete horlicks of the job, or else were so ill informed that they knew nothing of the candidates or what they stood for. So of all the electoral whims that our politicians have reason to be concerned about, the urge to write “Homer Simpson Number One!” on a ballot paper is hardly one of them.

And the fact that some politicians were prepared to entertain this notion of a constitutional right to spoil a vote shows just what craven slaves of media exposure certain TDs have become. And considering it was cited by respected journalists as an infringement of basic liberties in the same week that Michael McDowell, the justice minister, merrily sought to demonise “mental disorder” in his new immigration bill, and to jail prison warders if they reported on conditions and treatment to, say, Amnesty International, it might seem we have little to worry us.

So why not spare a thought, then, for the manufacturers of all those little stunted, ready-chewed pencils? What is to become of them when this new gadget with the buttons makes their product obsolete? And, as for the vast willing numbers who gave of their sweat and toil to tie the pencils to the hairy twine and then secure the other end to the polling booth table, how will they put bread on their tables now? If you’re looking for another daft cause to champion this week, take your pick.