How can we make voting easier?

By Vincenzo Rampulla / @VMRampulla

Over at Left Foot Forward, Will Straw has highlighted the issues MPs are currently debating given the content of the government’s Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. Labour will be rightly worried that the proposal of a referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV) system is being used to push through proposals that will restrict electors representation and gerrymander constituencies to the benefit of the parties in power rather than the electorate as a whole.

Whilst I think it is important stuff, I do wonder whether this is what the average voter on the street worries about. I suspect the ‘average voter’ has more simple electoral questions on their mind (whenever elections do pass through their minds):

• Why are votes always on a Thursday? Why can’t they do the election on a weekend?

• Why can’t I vote near work, or at the local post office/library, why is it always a primary school outside of my daily commute?

• Why can’t I vote online/text my vote? And if I have to vote in person why can’t they put the polling station on the high street where all the transport is?

Currently these simple, practical questions are rarely discussed. Why do we seem to have ignored the debate? Everyone is focused on what system of voting we should be using with no real attention given to what could be done to radically overhaul the way the vote is actually conducted in the UK.

It is easy understand why. The move to include postal and proxy voting proved hugely contentious for John Prescott when he introduced it for the Labour Government in 2001. Since then scandals and fear of manipulation have meant there has been little will to push innovation further. Yet everyone agrees about the importance of voting and the need to get people voting in elections, especially since voter turn-out has dropped since the early 90s.

I have some sympathy for those responsible for the system. It isn’t the easiest of subjects to try and tackle. The fact is that helping 29,691,780 people put an ‘x’ on their ballot paper to vote for one of the 4,150 candidates that contested the this year’s General Election, in a single day, is an incredible feat of modern administration.

But there’s something disappointing in the fact that people can travel to the moon, regularly and comfortably move vast amounts of money across the world through telephone cables, and choose in their millions their favourite X-factor contestant by text, but making it easier for people to vote for their MP seems beyond us.

Some of the biggest headlines of May 6/7th were of the queues outside 27 polling places across the UK as people scrambled to make their vote, albeit in some instances at the last possible minute. 1,200 votes were affected across 16 constituencies. Small fry given the number of successful voters but surely a rationale for looking seriously at some new ideas?

So I feel this year’s report by the Electoral Commission on the 2010 election was a missed opportunity. The Chair of the Electoral Commission, Jenny Watson, did not use her interview on yesterday’s Today programme to put forward a radical plan but simply suggested that voters who have joined the voting queue before 10pm should have the legal right cast their vote. Simple to understand, but hardly radical.

Credit where credit’s due, the Electoral Commission had been successful in increasing voter registration. Their “About my Vote” campaign successfully produced 700,000 new electors between December 2009 and April 2010. But the majority of these new voters are presumably more comfortable with the smart phones, Internet and mobility that is part of their modern lives. Voting doesn’t compare, so is it any wonder that the highest rates of non-turnout are with voters under 34.

There is no point in trying to argue that all non-voters don’t vote because they are uninterested in politics (for instance, the LSE found that voters were as interested in the battle between Gordon Brown and David Cameron as they were between Wilson and Douglas-Home). But modern, busy lives mean that our pre-21st system of casting your vote on paper and in person makes less and less sense to these non-voters and makes it harder for them to cast their vote.

I know that people need to trust our voting system and in many cases innovation has led to scandal. But if our elections are going to be more contentious, with ever closer results and if truly believe in making ‘every vote count‘ , then shouldn’t we also aim to get almost everyone?

This was also posted at the Young Fabian blog.