Use your vote today

Thursday May 5, 2005

The Washington Post yesterday described the 2005 general election campaign as a joyless march towards polling day and in too many ways that has been true. This is not a campaign whose end many of us will regret. Many of the worst, though often also many of the most irresistible, features of modern election campaigning have been on display over the past three and a half weeks. Politicians have remorselessly played the percentage game. The policy focus has been relentlessly narrow, the slogans mostly clunky and banal, the manifestos too bland and convergent (the skimpiness of the Tory one sets a new record). The party leaders have all but abandoned meeting or addressing ordinary voters in favour of a series of staged encounters with celebrity broadcasters.

Above all, this election, like others before it, has been organised overwhelmingly for the benefit of swing voters in marginal constituencies. Their concerns have been placed at the top of the party agendas, their preferred media have been targeted with messages tailored to their concerns, their phones, emails and letterboxes have been besieged, and their constituencies have been the only ones which the party leaders have visited or which have been treated to anything approaching detailed coverage. Just as in recent American elections, an ostensibly national contest and campaign has in reality been conceived and executed on the assumption that most voters in most constituencies can be left alone to vote the way they usually do. As a result, across most of Britain there has never been a less public general election. It is no wonder that so many people say they may not bother to take part in a contest which has done little to address them.

There are, though, things that can be done about this. As we have argued before, the government was right to encourage people to vote by making the act of voting more convenient. But its chosen means, a radical expansion of the postal voting system, has not been safely implemented and is not the long-term solution. There is an accumulation of evidence to suggest that tonight's results will be decisively affected by postal votes in many of the marginals. This does not necessarily mean that the results will be unsafe because of fraud, though there is sporadic evidence that a few of them may be, and that is bad enough. Yet with around a sixth of all votes cast by post this time, the results in the marginals will more than ever before be a test of party organisation as well as public opinion. Even in the marginals, therefore, this election has increased the gap between the ideal of a national contest and the modern reality of a precision battle. This is the inexorable logic of our existing electoral system. Unless there is radical change things can only get worse.

Even taking into account the large number of postal votes this time, it is not impossible that turnout in 2005 will be somewhere around the 59% record low in 2001. There are many causes of this dire level of electoral participation, but one of them is surely the voting system. Common sense says that the less your vote is likely to count the less you are likely to cast it. It therefore follows that the more that your vote counts the more likely you are to cast it. Changes to the voting system proposed by the Jenkins committee in 1998 would make more votes count, and would therefore promote participation. It is in the common interest that they should be revived.

Yet the picture is not undilutedly gloomy. Beneath the surface of this election, political debate has been strong. In the home, the worksplace, the shops and on the station platform it has been easy to hear people discussing how they should vote today. It may have been a joyless campaign but the national debate has been intense. Whatever else you do today, make sure that you cast your vote.