It may be because I’m reading too much Rothbard, at the moment, but when you see the world through the tinted glare of Rothbardianism, even the tiniest stories acquire potentially ghoulish significance. One such story that caught my eye today, over a celebratory coffee espresso, was John Prescott’s decision to abolish polling booths for local elections, and introduce postal-only ballots.
No doubt once this has been hailed a great success in such paragons of civic virtue as Doncaster City Council, this policy will be transferred to General Elections and the much anticipated Euro referendum.
Again and again through Rothbard’s writings you find references along the lines of, “the state will try to acquire control of the roads, in order to march its forces to trouble spots more easily, it will try to acquire control of the schools, in order to more easily educate the public on the munificence of the state, and it will try to acquire control of the postal system, in order to more easily monitor and control its citizens’ communications”. Or possibly to get ‘Yes’ votes on Euro referendums, or to get vital councillors elected in hung councils, or to get marginal seat Labour MPs returned to Westminster?
No, surely I’m not accusing a clearly honest administration, like Mr Blair’s, of deliberately rigging elections via a state-owned postal system? Surely I wouldn’t even dare to suggest such a calumny? I wouldn’t put it past them for a second. These parasites, these useless feckless human beings, these politicians, I wouldn’t put a single corrupt thing past them, and if I was a politician in control of this country and I wanted to take full control of the ‘democratic’ process, for the long-term good of the people naturally, I would make all elections postal-vote only. And then get all my ‘democratic’ friends in MI5 to do the decent thing and fix all my election results for me. It’s nice work if you can get it. Just ask all those nice French people who made up the majority of those who voted ‘Yes’ in the skin-of-the-teeth Maastricht vote in the French 1992 referendum. If any of them actually exist, of course.
Democracy in the UK? It’s a holiday in Cambodia.
Oh dear! what a surprise… never ever thought I would meet anyone as cycnical as me(I), with regard to politicians…
Having met, wined, dined, and generally socialised with many of them (The Enemy), by necessity, and not by choice, I might add, my level of distrust grew to become a real problem.
While I am a long way from being cured (12 steps anger management), your satirical post gave me some encouragement by knowing that I am not alone…
Now if Alice can just chastise me once more for being too grumpy, – easy with the spiked whip girl! – then I may well be on the road to recovery, if that isn’t possible, then it has to be the choice of the frontal lobotomy, or forced reading of The Sun.
Andy Duncan argues that the plan to abolish polling booths for local elections (i.e. to rely on all-postal ballots only) may conceivably be part of some devilish plot to rig election results.
Hmmm …. sounds like a stroll down paranoid lane to me. Though given the current state of the UK political establishment, paranoia is often hard to distinguish from common sense.
A more mundane interpretation may be that post-only ballots raise voter turnout by almost 30%. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/2000621.stm)
If that’s the case the chief argument against abolishing polling stations is that all-postal voting gives us more ‘democracy’ than is good for us. For example, an overdose of the morons’ vote is probably the last thing the country needs — not to mention the vote of the Labour-friendly criminal community.
Give elitism a chance — make voting such a chore that society’s bottom-feeders just won’t go to the bother.
Holiday in Cambodia, Dead Kennedys, 1979
I don’t know how it goes in Britain, but in the voting is normally done at nearby voting stations -one per precinct – typically in a semi-public facility such as a fire station or church.
The idea of having to physically go to the polling place, on the day everyone else is doing it, appeals to me. It makes voting part of a community activity, and reminds people that they are in a community! It also causes lazy voters not to vote, which is fine with me.
It used to be that voting by mail was only allowed if you had a good excuse – you had to be out of town or were sick or something. Now it has been made much easier, and voting registration has been made so easy that illegal aliens can easily, if illegally, vote – several times in the same election if they feel like it. It is hardly a surprise that the Democrats support both of these things, since lazy people and ethnics are much more likely to vote Democrat.
Of course, we wouldn’t have the spectacle of all those nice helpful Labour party activists and politicians going round to peoples (mainly pensioners) houses to ‘help’ them fill in their balot papers correctly, and then offering to post them for them. Like in the last local council elections. No surely not!
“Democracy in the UK? It’s a holiday in Cambodia.”
Actually a holiday in Cambodia is a lot more fun. Nostalgically wear that funky Khmer guerilla gear, stay at Raffles Angkor Hotel in Siem Reap see the temples, smoke the local weed… more fun the filling out a postal ballot.
Here on the West Coast voting by mail is enormously popular: you request a ballot, vote in the privacy of you home and send it out. When I moved to CA I thought it was a great idea. 2000 presidential election completely changed my outlook.
In 2000 election in addition to traditional voting dead we had voting felons, voting illegal aliens, people voting multiple times, and that was on top of the famous “disenfranchised” voters in Florida who could not figure out the butterfly ballot. And then there were the absentee votes. No, not only the Florida military ones but also those in San Francisco. Two boxes full of absentee votes were found in the City Hall – months after the election. Of course, it was just an oversight! Sorry! Honest mistakes do happen! And then somebody found lids from absentee ballot boxes floating in the Bay. Oh, it was just a wind that took the lids; no votes were lost, of course.
As it happens, statistically speaking people who vote by absentee ballot are more likely to be of libertarian or conservative persuasion. But it was only a coincidence that those absentee votes were lost in one of the more Marxist counties of the Left Coast !
Guess what. I will NEVER vote by absentee ballot again unless I will indeed travel during an election and have no other choice.
I hate the idea of voting at home for a more fundamental reason: you do not and can not know if the person voting is the same person who should be casting that ballot.
Unless you can convince me that a battered spouse can never have their vote cast by their batterer, or less sinisterly, that a dad can’t fill out the thing for his college kid, it should not be done. To put it in the language of the day, the battered spouse and the college kid would be disenfranchised in such a system.
You are right Ann. I treated it as a “convenience” in my personal case. However, once you consider how it may affect other people in other situations, you start realizing this bit of personal convenience may turn up to be a Trojan horse.
We should also be asked to present out legal IDs at the voting stations – not that it will matter now here in CA as our Beloved Leader just allowed illegal immigrants to apply for the CA driver license.
Every time I go to vote I pull out my ID, then put it away in disgust that it isn’t needed. One of these days I expect to show up to vote only to find out that someone else has cast my vote for me by masquerading as me…and who knows how many other people.
Aren’t the voter rolls public information? Couldn’t someone go from one poll station to another pretending to be other voters?
There’s another simple solution to fraud at the ballot box, one in use in Africa and other places: dip each voter’s thumb into ink to prove that they have already voted–no second votes would get through that way. During the 2000 election you had college kids in Milwaukee boasting to the media that they had gone to a couple different poll stations and casted multiple votes. If they showed up at the second poll station with inked thumbs, they wouldn’t have been able to vote. You could even use ultraviolet ink if you wanted, so people wouldn’t have to walk around with dyed thumbs.
Andy,
Even if you worst fears are well-founded, I am not sure I care or that it matters much any more. The new ruling class was well in place, their criminal empire built, long before 1997 and it will take lot more than an election upset to remove them.
A part of me quite welcomes the final process of disassemblement. Send in the clowns and let the pantomime begin for real. We can watch the delegitimisation happen in real time and stand aside while the chips fall where they may.
And David makes three!…
“Aren’t the voter rolls public information? Couldn’t someone go from one poll station to another pretending to be other voters?”
I am sure they can. I am also equally certain that they in fact do.
(sigh)
The state of Oregon’s had mail-only elections since 2000. There were some small glitches at first, but I haven’t heard of any major problems.
As for voter fraud, have you heard about the Diebold fun going on here in the US? There’s been a rush to put in place touchscreen voting machines, but relatively little effort put into proving they’re actually secure. Apparently the company had election records on a unsecured FTP server hours before anyone was supposed to have access to them. Oops. I’d watch out for similar fun over there before too long.
Mr Carr writes:
Even if you worst fears are well-founded, I am not sure I care or that it matters much any more. The new ruling class was well in place, their criminal empire built, long before 1997 and it will take lot more than an election upset to remove them.
Alas, I fear you’re right. Almost daily I become less convinced that ‘democracy’ is the great good it is so often trumpeted as being, but merely a device for perpetuating the rule of the oligarchy. Not the least worst alternative that Churchill described it as, but the best way of keeping the people subservient and thinking they’re free.
A part of me quite welcomes the final process of disassemblement. Send in the clowns and let the pantomime begin for real. We can watch the delegitimisation happen in real time and stand aside while the chips fall where they may.
I just worry that this ‘final breakdown’ may result in something really tragic like the death of tens of thousands, or even millions, in the UK, as our increasingly balkanised state falls apart.
If we could somehow prevent such a catastrophe and move towards a free society without the intervening period of turmoil, I would welcome this and would try to work towards it. But does this just let the statists perpetuate their rule, this attitude of avoiding at all costs such a conflict? They offer us the choice of Early Death or Taxes, and people like me choose option two, to avoid option one, and the buggers rule forever.
It’s maddening.
Remember a non-vote is a VOTE against the state!
Voting levels and taxation costs should be linked, then we will see…
David Carr writes:
“Even if you worst fears are well-founded, I am not sure I care or that it matters much any more. The new ruling class was well in place, their criminal empire built, long before 1997 and it will take lot more than an election upset to remove them.”
I can, as usual, only agree with David Carr. Looking at the sorry state of all our political parties in the UK, I find it impossible to have any faith in any of them.
And, more importantly, even if I had, it is not they who really govern this country – it is run by the bleak armies of lawyers (sorry, Mr. Carr), civil servants, teachers, broadcasters, academics and other assorted Left-liberals, who professionally despise everything this country has ever achieved and who wish it utterly recast in some mould of their own fantasies.
The sooner the whole edifice collapses under the weight of its own mad and contradictory ambitions, the sooner we can start again.
Well, that’s four, – now can I hear someone in favour of the staus quo!….. I wonder if Ms Toynbee reads this blog, a reply from her might really get the pot boiling.
Toynbee can read? She certainly cannot write!
I allways see Tolly Poynbee as a sort of “Diana Moon Glampers” kindof person, whenever I read her trash it makes me laugh even more!
Do you want to know more?
G Cooper,
” it is run by the bleak armies of lawyers (sorry, Mr. Carr)”
No need to apologise, old chap. T’is true.