Alison Prince

The dissent box

The one important thing that comes out of the scanty, ragged by-election in Glasgow north-east, is the fact that two thirds of the people who could have voted did not do so. There will be official tutting, of course, about this 'apathy', both from political pundits and the knee-jerk meeja – but even the most casual sampling of opinion shows that non-voting often reflects cynicism rather than apathy.
     For thousands of people, staying away from the polling station seems the only way to express a deep anger and disillusion. It is a sadly inadequate way to convey such feelings, a card that can be flipped only too easily to show a blank reverse side of uniform indifference – but the present voting system has no mechanism for the expression of dissent.
     To tick any box is to confirm tacit approval of the alternatives offered. Any failure to do this reinforces the bland official assumption that refuseniks are stupid/ignorant/do not care. (Tick box.) Thus the electorate helplessly carries the blame for the increasing failure of an inadequate representation system.
     A revision of the polling form is urgently needed, with provision of a box at the end of the list saying NO SUITABLE CANDIDATE or VOTE WITHHELD. Such provision would have to be widely publicised so that all potential voters knew of its existence. It would then provide a very significant statistic. No doubt the genuinely indifferent would still stay away, but those who govern us would have to recognise that a large proportion of the community is deliberately refusing to vote. Far from 'not caring', they care only too much, and at present, there is no way to record their active dissent. The 'first past the post' system ensures that principled voters for parties such as the Greens will never see more than minority representation, and increases the tendency to shrug the whole thing off.
     Anyone who has read José Saramago's Nobel Prize-winning book 'Seeing' will perceive at once that the provision of a dissent box might bring about a completely different form of politics. In his scenario, mounting numbers of people return the ballot form with no box ticked (which, indeed, might be a simple tactic to adopt here), but when the number of 'blankers' begins to worry the government, the full force of its authority is unleashed in horrifying ferocity.
     This poses a radical question. Do we fear the opinion of dissenters so much that we dare not recognise their existence? At the moment, non-voters form a loose body, merely agreeing in casual conversations at supermarket tills and bus stops that the economic system now governing us has unravelled and that ethics have gone by the board. It is time to take a scared but straight look at this huge body of disillusion, for its one weapon, dissent expressed as blanket inertia, seems set to reveal the present mechanism of democratic representation as a farce.