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The turnout at the last UK General Election was the lowest since the Second World War.

The turnout at the next one is likely to be lower still.

People don't vote for a variety of reasons - the one they most often give is 'it's a protest' sometimes varied with 'I don't agree with any of the parties and I refuse to endorse a system I disagree with'. These sound like postitive statements of dissent, they sound noble and considered and thought through. They feel comfortable to say. More often they disguise feelings of disempowerment and disenfranchisement, or simple moral and intellectual laziness.

People were killed to enable you to vote.

People are still being killed because they hope for the right to vote.

People are being killed now in order to prevent them voting.

People have been killed this very year because they have voted.

And you sit on your lazy, complacent backside and say 'I don't vote in order to make a protest'?

Gibberish!

Very few party members buy into all the politics of the party they subscribe to. They vote for the party whose philosophy most aligns with theirs. If you dislike them all equally, if you want to make a protest, if you want to show your dissent, then spoil your paper¹ or don't mark it at all. Spoiled papers are counted. Spoiled papers show that you made the effort. Spoiled papers show that you filled in the form to register your vote, that you turned up at the poll station, that you considered all the options, and that you rejected them.

Failing to turn up puts you in in the same league as those who cannot be bothered to think, who will take the rights this country gives them but who will do sweet nothing at all in return, who expect freedoms and liberties and healthcare and rubbish collections as a matter of course but who have no sense of obligation in return.

Until we have the option 'None of the above' on a ballot paper, spoiling it, or returning a blank one with no marks on it at all, are the only ways of saying 'none of these candidates are suitable'. If you reject the candidates, use your vote to make your statement of dissent.

Contrary to popular opinion, spoiled papers are read:

As of last time I went on a count (election before last), 'spoilt' papers were kept separately and read. During a long evening of counting and watching counting in a safe seat they are, after all, just about the only points of interest. If it's a close vote they're all scrutinised to confirm that they really are spoilt votes - candidates and their reps read them. So not only does it stop the candidates writing off low turnout as apathy but any comments written on the slip to spoil it might just perhaps make a drop of a difference. If they're written clearly and sanely anyway².

Silence means consent. Failing to vote is to accept the status quo, not to reject it.

• 1500 - 1831: Men and women who owned land or property had the right to vote.
  
  

  A survey conducted in 1780 revealed that the electorate in England and Wales consisted of just 214,000 people - less than 3% of the total population of approximately 8 million. In Scotland the electorate was even smaller: in 1831 a mere 4,500 men, out of a population of more than 2.6 million people, were entitled to vote in parliamentary elections. Large industrial cities like Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester did not have a single MP between them...³

• 1832: Women lost the right, but middle class men without land or property gained the right.
  
  

  The Peterloo Massacre is the name given to the events in St Peter's Fields in Manchester, England, on 16 August 1819, when an open-air meeting in support of parliamentary reform was charged by yeomanry (voluntary cavalry soldiers) and hussars (regular cavalry soldiers). ... The crowd, numbering some 60,000 and including many women and children, was unarmed and entirely peaceful. The magistrates, who had brought in special constables from Lancashire and the Cheshire Yeomanry, nevertheless became nervous and ordered [the speaker's] arrest. As the yeomanry attempted to obey them, they were pressed by the mob. The hussars were sent in to help, and, in the general panic which followed, 11 people were killed and about 500 injured⁴.

  In the 1830s the riots in Bristol were some of the worst seen in England in the 19th century. ... Public buildings and houses were set on fire, there was more than £300,000 of damage and twelve people died. Of 102 people arrested and tried, 31 were sentenced to death⁵.

• 1867: Better off workers from the industrial cities could vote and 45 constituencies were moved to towns and cities from small rural/countryside areas.
  
  

  The nature of actions in 1850 to obtain votes were in some cases of a fierce and even violent method. In some cases voters were kidnapped until voting was over and frequently elections were accompanied by fighting between armed gangs hired by the candidates. As well as the methods of intimidation that were used bribery was also used, voters were able to sell their votes in some cases they would go to such lengths as advertising them⁶.

• 1872: The secret ballot was introduced and working class men gained the right.
  
  

  After the passing of the 1867 Reform Act working class males now formed the majority in most borough constituencies. However, employers were still able to use their influence in some constituencies because of the open system of voting. In parliamentary elections people still had to mount a platform and announce their choice of candidate to the officer who then recorded it in the poll book⁷.

• 1918: Women gained the right but only if they were over 30 years of age.
  
  

  It never happened to Emmeline [Pankhurst] but other women were force fed – tubes shoved up their noses and liquid food poured down – so painful their screams could be heard all over the prison. The public was disgusted so the government brought in the 'Cat and Mouse Act'. As soon as a suffragette got weak through not eating, she was released until she was stronger, then re-arrested, time after time⁸.

  Emily Wilding Davison is probably the best known person to have been killed fighting for universal suffrage: 'Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God' she wrote, wrapped the paper round stones and threw them at Lloyd George's car. At once arrested, she stopped eating, and barricaded herself in her cell so no one could get in to force-feed her. ... They stuck a hosepipe through a window and filled the cell up with water. She would have drowned, willingly, but in the end the door was broken down. ... In 1913 ... at the Derby, she ran out in front of the King's horse, her skull was fractured and she died⁹.

• 1928: Men and women over the age of 21 had the right. Though Female Suffrage has not been universal by any means¹⁰, and Britain should not be complacent about its record for electing female MPs - we rank 49th in the world¹¹.
• 1969: The age limit was reduced to 18 years of age.

This fight for the right to vote is not over, it is not a matter of history. It is a matter for our own times.

The election in Iraq is without precedent. Never, not even in the dying days of Weimar Germany, when Nazis and Communists brawled in the streets, has there been such a concerted attempt to destroy an election through violence - with candidates unable to appear in public, election workers driven into hiding, foreign monitors forced to 'observe' from a nearby country, actual voting a gamble with death, and the only people voting safely the fortunate expatriates and exiles abroad. - Michael Ignatieff¹²

The recent election in Zimbabwe was also deeply flawed:

... critics of President Robert Mugabe say the climate of openness is a thin veneer over a deeply flawed electoral process. ... The voters' roll lies at the heart of the protest. Without proper scrutiny there are claims that hundreds of thousands of dead people will take part in the election - and cynics add that the dead do not vote for the opposition. The police and army will man many of the 8,000-odd polling stations. There are complaints that the electoral commission is run by ruling party loyalists. There have been claims of subtle intimidation in the rural areas and even reports of food aid being used as a political weapon¹³.

But you can vote. You are free to vote in private for whoever you choose, or you are free to make the statement in private that you would choose none of them. To fail to turn up is to scorn, from your position of priveledged and complacent freedom, those who fought for and won that freedom for you over almost 200 years. And it is to scorn those who are even now killed, maimed, imprisioned or intimidated in order to prevent the democratic processes working in other parts of the world.

It doesn't matter who you vote for.

It doesn't matter whether you reject them all and spoil your paper, or return a blank one. These are, in fact, the only statements which say 'I believe in democracy, but reject the politicians'.

It does matter that you turn up and vote.

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Valid votes as % of electorate

1945 - 72.8%

1950 - 83.9%

1951 - 82.6%

1955 - 76.8%

1959 - 78.7%

1964 - 77.1%

1966 - 75.8%

1970 - 72.0%

1974 - 78.8%

1974 - 72.8%

1979 - 76.0%

1983 - 72.7%

1987 - 75.3%

1992 - 77.7%

1997 - 71.4%

2001 - 59.4%

Sources: British Electoral Facts: 1832-1999, Parliamentary Research Services House of Commons Library data

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