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narcasseYesterday glancing over my RSS feeds I came across this particular article involving a response to the upcoming European elections. Now I have received little ‘vote for us’ pamphlets from the Conservative and Labour parties but little else. I have my polling card and the knowledge that Mr Farage’s party will be all for withdrawing from the EU still but that’s really about it. I know there was some furore with the Tories withdrawing from the European People’s Party but that was only ever anecdotal information and I’ve no idea where they stand now. So I will readily admit that there is a horrible lack of information in this country but that’s not what annoyed me in this case. My irritation stemmed from what was essentially a pointless gesture in protest: spoiling the ballot paper.
Spoiling the ballot falls into that category of self-indulgent ‘protest’ that is glorified by and typified by the privileged intelligentsia. They won’t just not do anything because apathy is for the lower classes and by god they’re not common oiks, they’re making a point dagnamit. Except they’re not. They’re not making a point or even a visible protest at all. Because I can guarantee that when the ballot papers are being sorted nobody is going to look at spoiled papers and think “My word, with a valiant protest in the name of democracy”: they’re probably not going to think much of anything at all as they toss said paper into the spoiled pile. It wouldn’t even be identifiable as anything other than somebody failing to follow procedure correctly thus invalidating their vote. Having handled council surveys before, spoiling your ballot is even less obvious a ‘protest’ than the one made by morons who scratch out ‘heterosexual’ and write ‘normal’ instead for sexual orientation, and my response to that sort of thing was to consider the person an idiot. I didn’t think they were striking a blow for heteronormativity: I thought they were the kind of idiots that were walking propaganda for an active eugenics program. And if there wasn’t necessarily a screed in poorly spelled English from people who were evidently native speakers somewhere on the page I did accept that those individuals might not even be homophobes at all and instead just utter morons. Similarly, a spoiled ballot paper unless it’s accompanied with deranged scribbling about the flaws in the system will just be taken to be a mistake and even if it does come with a byte sized rant, it’s unlikely to produce much of a response beyond the people sorting the ballots shaking their heads.
So if spoiling your ballot doesn’t register as a protest wouldn’t scrawling something down do the trick? The answer to that is not really because again it’s a useless protest and is more about being able to tell your friends that you ‘stuck it to the man’ rather than actively trying to make any sort of a difference. There’s no point in doing anything to the ballot papers other than voting with them and if you don’t want to then don’t, it’ll provide better leverage by weight of numbers for the rest of us. Of course if you do genuinely want to take action and facilitate change, while your voice might be only a lone one, you can still take real action by maybe saving that screed for a letter to somebody who actually has the power to, if not make changes, at least advance the idea. Send an e-mail, spread the word, talk to someone (especially if you’re friends with the goddamn local MP): do something or nothing if you so choose but don’t make some kind of asinine ‘protest’ just so that you can boast to your friends that you did something when you’ve done nothing at all but pat yourself on the back. If you’re not going to take part in the democratic process then fine but don’t pretend that your opinion with its faux-protest has then mattered when the votes come in. After all, if you effectively do nothing, representative democracy will continue to occur with the rest of us turning the gears: just don’t expect it to give much of a damn about your opinion just because you dress your apathy up in intellectual privilege.
Spoiling the ballot falls into that category of self-indulgent ‘protest’ that is glorified by and typified by the privileged intelligentsia. They won’t just not do anything because apathy is for the lower classes and by god they’re not common oiks, they’re making a point dagnamit. Except they’re not. They’re not making a point or even a visible protest at all. Because I can guarantee that when the ballot papers are being sorted nobody is going to look at spoiled papers and think “My word, with a valiant protest in the name of democracy”: they’re probably not going to think much of anything at all as they toss said paper into the spoiled pile. It wouldn’t even be identifiable as anything other than somebody failing to follow procedure correctly thus invalidating their vote. Having handled council surveys before, spoiling your ballot is even less obvious a ‘protest’ than the one made by morons who scratch out ‘heterosexual’ and write ‘normal’ instead for sexual orientation, and my response to that sort of thing was to consider the person an idiot. I didn’t think they were striking a blow for heteronormativity: I thought they were the kind of idiots that were walking propaganda for an active eugenics program. And if there wasn’t necessarily a screed in poorly spelled English from people who were evidently native speakers somewhere on the page I did accept that those individuals might not even be homophobes at all and instead just utter morons. Similarly, a spoiled ballot paper unless it’s accompanied with deranged scribbling about the flaws in the system will just be taken to be a mistake and even if it does come with a byte sized rant, it’s unlikely to produce much of a response beyond the people sorting the ballots shaking their heads.
So if spoiling your ballot doesn’t register as a protest wouldn’t scrawling something down do the trick? The answer to that is not really because again it’s a useless protest and is more about being able to tell your friends that you ‘stuck it to the man’ rather than actively trying to make any sort of a difference. There’s no point in doing anything to the ballot papers other than voting with them and if you don’t want to then don’t, it’ll provide better leverage by weight of numbers for the rest of us. Of course if you do genuinely want to take action and facilitate change, while your voice might be only a lone one, you can still take real action by maybe saving that screed for a letter to somebody who actually has the power to, if not make changes, at least advance the idea. Send an e-mail, spread the word, talk to someone (especially if you’re friends with the goddamn local MP): do something or nothing if you so choose but don’t make some kind of asinine ‘protest’ just so that you can boast to your friends that you did something when you’ve done nothing at all but pat yourself on the back. If you’re not going to take part in the democratic process then fine but don’t pretend that your opinion with its faux-protest has then mattered when the votes come in. After all, if you effectively do nothing, representative democracy will continue to occur with the rest of us turning the gears: just don’t expect it to give much of a damn about your opinion just because you dress your apathy up in intellectual privilege.
