Just been talking with a number of people who didn't get to vote...One of them had been deleted from the electoral register, and others didn't get a chance to vote during the day because of other commitments and were turned away because it went past 10pm...

Not sure how I feel about that, but a shame none the less.

The first is a shame and should be investigated. The others... well the polling stations were open for 15 hours and there's got to be a cutoff point somewhere.

Jon

I find that people in/interested in IT are often quite liberal in their outlook. Indeed, many a PC Pro article would mention the Daily Mail in a bad light, while others from them would often link to a Guardian article... I suppose I'm for cynical pragmatism and giving anyone who deserves it a good kicking

I'm sorry, but that's just not on as far as I'm concerned. Most people have jobs and can't get to the polling stations before the evening. I think that anyone who joined the queue before 10 should be allowed to vote and the station remains open until they're finished.

Umm, no. Why are their queues at all? What's the average turnout here? 66%ish? What happened if everybody turned up? Clearly more capacity is needed.

People shouldn't be turned away, because people should be able to vote whenever they turn up and not have to wait longer than a few minutes.

Anybody who wants to vote, should be able to on the day. Whenever they get there.

I voted before I went to work, I'm sure many others could and did. No-one should be denied their vote, especially through poor planning and incompetence.

I think 07:00-22:00 is a large enough window to allow everyone to vote if they haven't done so by post/proxy. What there should have been is greater capacity, and what there shouldn't have been is a shortage of ballots or segregation.

The law apparently is that if your voting slip hasn't been issued at 10PM you don't get to vote, not whether you're in the queue or not. Issuing slips later than that would legally invalidate the ballot box at that station, thus denying everyone who had voted their mandate. The polling stations are organized to be close to where people live and were open before most people had to go to work and for a whole day and evening, not just from 8PM to 10PM. If you're a busy person there is also postal voting. Nobody has been denied the chance to vote, people have just been denied the convenience of voting at the last minute.

Nobody is unavailable from 7AM to 10PM. If people didn't vote it's because they decided there were things more important in their life than voting. The consequence may have been they didn't get to vote but it's largely down to a decision they made.

As it happens, personally, I think election day should be a national holiday and voting should close earlier (to encourage people to vote and get the results in at a time most people are awake) but it doesn't change the fact that if you turned up to the polling station after it's already been open for 14 hours and didn't get in in time, you're at least partly culpable.

The one I really don't understand is the one that ran out of voting slips. How that's possible when they know exactly how many people are going to be voting in each station.. well I find that more than a bit ludicrous.

Jon

agree totally

I've just been reminded that Mandleson said on TV last night that the issues at the polling stations was unfair to Labour voters as they vote later and Tory voters vote earlier. The twat

Because an awful lot of people thought they could leave it to the last minute?

And where will that capacity come from? People are a limited and not easily moved resource plus the staff have to be trained in the legal procedures for voting, you can't just ask for volunteers on the day. Do you have all polling stations able to handle say 10% of the allowed voters turning up at once? At any given time of the day? Where will you get the volunteers? What will they do for the 99% of the time they'll be sat around doing nothing? Or do you have the required minimum of staff at each station and a pool of reserve staff that can be bussed round if they are needed? Are the buses that fast? What happens if you get a sudden rush just before the polls close and you can't get the reserve staff to the station to help?
You can't just magic up more polling station officials at the drop of a hat. Maybe there should be more but finding people willing to take a day off to sit around doing nothing (who you would actually consider even vaguely reliable) isn't actually as easy as you'd think.


Um. The staff at the station are legally required to turn them away if they can't be processed by 10PM. That's the law as it stands. The opening hours of the polling station are on the sheet that everyone gets telling them where to vote. It's not far to go in an urban area. You get plenty of warning.


No. There are laws about who can vote and laws about how you vote. There's no law that says that voting should take less than 10 minutes of your precious time.


Thats not the law and it's never likely to be and anyway you're not solving the problem, you're just moving it to two hours later. if you're busy on the day, there are other ways to ensure your vote is counted that only require a minimum of organisation on your part. I don't see why the fact that it's an election somehow absolves people of the responsibility to be even slightly conscientious about their responsibilities. Voting may be considered a right but it's also a privilege and too many people seem to have taken that very lightly indeed, only to suddenly decide it was really really important once they discovered they'd lost it.

As they say (apparently in Birmingham mosty) 'vote early, vote often' .

Jon, I realise "that's the law". But I didn't know that, and clearly a lot of the electorate didn't. Besides, just because it's the law, doesn't make it right.

I'm not saying they could've done anything yesterday, but change is no doubt required.

Ignorance is no excuse under the eyes of the law and never has been. Voting is a privilage as well as a right.

yup the change required for most cases is.. dont leave it until the last moment.

Its quite ironic that Iraquis would be prepared to stand out in the blazing sun all day long with the constant threat of violence just to be able to vote with very few complaints. Yet the cozy westerners couldnt queue for an hour or two in relative comfort.

Voting, should not be a privilege. Self-determination should not be a privilege. Maybe it is, but I fervently disagree with that position. It really depends on how much you equate voting, with self-determination. Self-determination is a basic human need as I believe I mentioned the other day.