The Guardian view on voter registration: sign up and be counted
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Version 0 of 1. What happens on 7 May is, more than any election in recent times, likely to shape Britain, perhaps for a generation or more. The main parties, so often derided for being all the same, are actually fundamentally divided over Europe, what the relationship between the different parts of the UK should be, how public services will look in the future, and the very size and shape of the state. Related: How to register to vote in the general election 2015 But despite the huge significance of this vote, millions of citizens are disenfranchising themselves. They have yet to register. And if you don’t register by midnight on Monday, then you won’t be voting on Thursday 7 May. Students, it’s not even necessary to get out of bed! As long as you have your national insurance number and access to the internet, you can register online at www.gov.uk/register-to-vote. If you don’t, you will disappear into unrecorded space, a mass whose presence, like the Higgs boson, can be deduced only from the maths. This is the first election on the new system of individual registration. It was supposed to be a way of modernising and cleaning up the voting process, after successive elections saw damaging evidence of corruption made easier by the old system where the head of the household could sign up as many names as they wanted. Related: A tale of two constituencies: the highs and lows and political engagement The Electoral Commission has been running campaigns for more than a year to try to alert those hard-to-reach demographics – students, black and minority ethnic and working-class voters, and women – who will have been a large part of the third of the electorate who didn’t vote in 2010. It has run campaigns aimed at singles, at recent home movers and at young people. Yet many of these potential voters remain uninspired. As Russell Brand would argue, that’s partly a failure of politics. Too many people feel that none of the parties represent their interests. Parties long since stopped representing one half of the electorate or the other. Last March, the Hansard Society, an organisation devoted to promoting and improving parliament, published its latest audit of political engagement, a series that began after the 2001 election, where the turnout was just 59%, the lowest in modern times. Each year the audit confirms a declining trend in satisfaction in the way the political system works. Support for parliament as a necessary part of Britain’s democracy is ebbing in a manner that should alarm all democrats. The most resentful are Ukip supporters and, not unexpectedly, Scottish National party voters: rejecting Westminster is the basis of their appeal. But it is more complicated than that association implies: the middle-aged in middle England turn out to be more dissatisfied than younger or older voters. The most content, and the most likely to vote, are white, older, richer and male. The least likely are under 24 and from a BME background. This portrait of a fragmented, disengaged and possibly significantly disenfranchised electorate matters to us all. The number of seats each party wins will, in our parliamentary system, be decisive in terms of forming a government. But the share of the vote garnered by each party, and the number of votes a party wins compared with the number of seats, might lend a moral authority that is weightier than the sheer arithmetic allows. The electoral process is not the cause of the breakdown of party affiliation. Rather, it probably shored it up for longer than it deserved. But it is clear now that it must be reformed before it weakens support for parliament even further. This must be the last general election that is fought on the principle of first past the post. But the change won’t come unless people vote for it. And you can’t vote if you don’t register. |