I don't vote, I don't pay community tax

[venta]

If we assume that:

(a) most people don't bother voting in elections[*]
(b) people are more likely to complain when they don't like something than offer praise when they do

does it follow that parties like UKIP will always do well in elections for MEPs ?

[*] Turn-out figures show that about 1 in 3 people voted in the European elections last week.

Comments

[hjalfi.livejournal.com]

Draw a big X across the whole thing and post it --- it'll be counted as 'spoiled ballot', and is the standard way of saying 'I bothered to come out and vote but there weren't any candidates I wanted to vote for'.

Unfortunately the BBC news coverage (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/elections/euro/09/html/ukregion_999999.stm) doesn't actually say how many there were; I'd be interested to know... but it might be instructive to add up all the different numbers of votes and see if it makes up the total.

[(Anonymous)]

Indeed my usual practice is to turn up and "spoil" my vote in the event of there being no acceptable candidates. But some other people spoil their votes by accident. If spoiling my vote I write "none of these are acceptable", but in the counting of votes this is not distinguished from spoilt votes by the incompetent. Hence the need for a special box.