ninme

Telegraph – Voting should be made harder, not easier. By Daniel Hannan (Conservative MEP for South-East England)

So how’s this for an alternative approach: why not make the act of voting a little harder? Perhaps it is precisely because we can fill in our ballot papers at the kitchen table that we set such little store by the whole process. Maybe if we had to go to a little effort, we might feel a commensurate sense of occasion.

I have acted as an election monitor in various hot countries and, believe me, there are few sights so humbling for a politician as a pre-dawn queue of voters waiting for the polling station to open. These voters have usually had to go to a good deal of trouble to register and, in consequence, they are determined to cast their ballots.

Election monitors are typically given a check-list of questions: was there any intimidation, were the ballot boxes secure, were scrutineers present at the count? But the very first question on the list is: “What procedures are in place to verify the identity of the voter?”

In Britain, the answer is “None”. You go in, you give your name, and the nice people behind the desk tick you off. Or you gather as many postal vote forms as you can, fill them in and return them en masse. If we were being monitored by international observers, we would fall at the first hurdle.

In most democracies, people have to dip their thumbs in indelible ink when they vote. As well as preventing malpractice, the procedure marks out those who have shirked their civic duty.

Following the Sandinista victory in the recent Nicaraguan election, I flew back with a plane-load of disgruntled expatriates, almost all of whom had voted for the losing candidate. There were three young men on board, however, who carried the stigma of ink-free thumbs, and who had vinegary comments directed at them all the way to Miami and rightly so.

Heh.