So Geoff Hoon suggest compulsory voting. Is he mad?

I am all in favour of having turnout at elections increased – in Broadfield we have seen turnouts at elections as low as about 12% – but I don’t think that making it compulsory is the way to go.

The Guardian has a list of countries where voting is compulsory. I did find it amusing that in some places one of the penalties for not voting is being removed from the register of voters. Now thats what I call the ultimate in ironic deterrents!

I have idealistic and practical reasons for not supporting this idea.

The idealistic reason is that the right to not vote is as important as the right to vote. Personally I will always vote, but I am very much in a minority where I live. On election day I spoke to people who could not be bothered to go a few hundred metres to the polling station, but surely that is our fault for not being able to persuade them that it was worth their while to make that short trip.

A practical reason for opposition is that there is a risk of people who feel forced to vote just casting their vote in an arbitrary way as a protest. Perhaps there could be a random vote for the first (or last) name on the ballot paper, or a huge vote for a fringe candidate.

Actually, there are times when I do not vote. When I first joined the Labour party I did not vote for all the internal elections (NEC or NPF positions) if I did not feel I knew enough about the candidates to make a proper choice. I could have voted for the person whose name sounded best, or whose photo I liked best. I could have voted for, say, a female or black candidate purely to increase black or female representation, regardless of whether they were the best candidates but I didn’t. In the same way I have not always voted at work for the employee representative on a pension fund, or for a candidate for a trade union position, and I have not voted for board positions on building societies.

In all those cases I did not feel qualified to vote as I didn’t know enough about the issues or the candidates. Maybe I read the little biographies of the candidates and felt that they all sounded the same and it wouldn’t make any difference. In other words, for all the same reasons that are given on the doorstep for not voting in local or general elections.

If I had been forced to vote for employee reps on pension funds I would have voted using the same criteria as when picking a horse in a Grand National sweepstake, and who is to say that ‘proper’ elections would not get decided the same way.

Lets be honest and admit that there is a noticable racial element to elections. In Crawley you can see it when there are multiple seats up for election in a local borough or council election. If a party has two or three candidates, the one with an obviously ‘foreign’ name gets fewer votes. In Three Bridges we had candidates called Patel and Barnes-Austin. Barnes-Austin got elected, Patel did not. In Broadfield we had candidates called Quinn and Patel. Quinn got many more votes than Patel. In Southgate we had candidates called Sharma, Joyce and Irvine. Sharma got the fewest votes. And so on. You can look at historical results and see the same story repeated every time. I can’t think of a single exception.

The difference in votes for ‘English’ and ‘ethnic’ names is significant, and that is amongst people who are informed and motivated enough to vote. I just think that it would be even more pronounced than that if we added a huge number of people who are only voting for arbitrary reasons. We would end up with fewer ethnic minority and female MPs and councillors as a result.

Do we then make sure we pre-empt a racially-influenced electorate by making racially-influenced selections? Or do we stick to our principles and lose seats as a result? Neither option is attractive.

Maybe more trivial, but we could see the same effect on how people look, and end up with elections decided by who looks best – which some would say happens alerady to a lesser extent in some cases. Some of our best councillors in the past have been ugly bastards. The best-looking councillor we have ever had in Crawley was absolutely useless.

I just don’t want to find myself at a ward selection meeting, having to decide whether to select the worst candidate to stand for us because their name starts with A and will end up on the top of the ballot paper, or for some other trivial reason.

(Maybe the Tories already do that? Of their 16 borough councillors, 7 have names starting with B, another with C and another with D!)