The disenfranchisement of voters
On my web site, I describe the political systems of some 11 nations. Sometimes i am asked which country has the most democratic system. This is not a question that one can really answer, but one day I intend to write an essay for my web site setting out the criteria one would adopt in assessing how democratic a particular country’s system is in practice.
I would start with questions about voting: what proportion of the population is eligible to vote? what proportion of those eligible to vote is actually registered to vote? what proportion of those registered to vote actually vote?
This week, we learned some new information about the second question for Britain. Astonishly we find that some six million people eligible to vote are not actually registered to vote – that’s around 15%. Amazingly around half of those not registered to vote think that they are.
Among the groups most likely to be disenfranchised in this way are young people and ethnic minority people – both sections of the electorate more likely to vote Labour than Conservative.
This would be bad news at any time, but it is especially disturbing when all the constituency boundaries are being redrawn because the Coalition Government wants to reduce the number of seats in the House of Commons from 650 to 600.
More in formation here.