Voting.

Well, election time is coming up again and we have to brace ourselves for a barrage of advertising of the ‘virtues of various candidates’ and of course their parties. We will be told of all of the wonderful things they will do for us, but will probably be less forthcoming on what they will do to us.

Interspersed among these in Australia will of course be some by the Electoral Commission warning us that voting is compulsory and that failure to do so, will incur fines.

Yes folks, in this great democracy of ours the right to vote has been taken away and replaced with a compulsion to vote. The reason I say that the right to vote has been removed is that a right is something that the individual can choose to do or not do as free will decides. I have the right to drink, but if I do not choose to do so I don’t.

No publican has the right to lay criminal charges, or sue me for failing to do so. Some of them may have a beef about this, but are not likely to be taken seriously. I will not be fined for failing to drink; therefore my right to drink is untainted.

Voting needs to be reformed, if for no better reason than that the disinterested people who go along to vote because they are compelled to, probably skew results. How many people have been voted in or out by people who essentially don’t care enough about the process enough to vote voluntarily.

I have some modest suggestions for reform here.

(1) Voluntary voting.

(2) Optional preferences. Queensland is as far as I know the only state where it is not compulsory to allocate preferences. A vote for only one candidate elsewhere without preference allocation is invalid despite clearly being for that candidate.

(3) An extra box on bottom of the ballot paper marked “None of the above”. This gives the voter the right to vote that none of those candidates are acceptable. If ‘none of the above’ were to win, then a by-election must be held with the original candidates disqualified from standing.

(4) Public campaign funding should be abolished.

Politicians will be opposed to these reforms because they offer the threat of demonstrating how little interest that they arouse in the electorates in some cases, and because public funding is based on the number of votes they get.

There can be no justification for public funding. It can not even be claimed that political parties deserve this through ‘Public Interest’ as the only support they deserve is that which the public is prepared to voluntarily give them. Arguments have been made that public funding reduces corruption, however the best method of achieving this would be for the politicians to be less corrupt.