bitful

I cast my votes last night (Mayor of London, members of the London Assembly and members of the European Parlament) and I am particularly proud of the achievement. I "bathed in the virtuous glow of the Active Participant In The Democratic Process".

I am also rather impressed with the absence of police guarding the polling station as they are required to do in Italy, and the lack of any sort of identity check on my person. I did not have a voting card but I showed a letter in my name from LondonElects addressed as "Dear voter", they checked I was on their lists, confirmed that I was entitled to vote for all three elections, and that was it. No pompous official asking me to produce a piece of ID, then saying my name out loud to another who stamped my elector card before giving me the ballots. Pleasant and surprisingly easy but… what if I went and voted for Italian representatives in the European Parliament tomorrow? Would anyone check and stop me from voting twice?

On the way out a woman sitting at a desk asked me for my elector's number, which I did not have. She had told my friend waiting for me outside that towards the end of the voting window parties asked for the lists of who has voted, and if they think there are people who are likely to vote for them who have not been to the polling station yet, they send a car round at the last minute to drive them there. This woman was wearing a huge blue prizewinner ribbon pinned to her lapel. A huge arrow with blinking lightbulbs spelling "Conservative" would have been more discreet - or am I misinterpreting the blue ribbon symbology altogether?

Next time I might wait until the last minute too - I've always fancied the full stretch limo treatment.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 11th, 2004 at 6:34 am and is filed under uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.