Why ‘Super Thursday’ on May 6 doesn’t get my vote
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DILIGENT Post readers will have noted at the foot of last week’s Page 6: “Spring date confirmed for elections”.
Finally, an apparent Government decision: this year’s scheduled local elections, plus every Covid-postponed election, will all take place on May 6th.
It’s a lot: councillors in 150 English councils and the London Assembly, 13 mayors – eight, including ours in the West Midlands, carried over from last year – 40 police and crime commissioners, plus Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd members. Over 5,000 representatives in 4,300-plus separate ballots.
And that’s just the Electoral Commission’s list. If you’re punctilious – like the Democracy Club, who correctly add town and parish council elections, local referendums and suchlike – there’s plenty more in what might well be our “most complex elections ever”.
All on one unextended day, with voting mainly in person, in rigorously sanitised polling stations which shouldn’t be schools, staffed by as yet unrecruited and – judging by normal practice – generally elderly volunteers. And bring your own stubby pencil – sharpened, because some of us will have three or four ballot papers.
Whereupon, I should declare an interest, indeed several.
First, simply a lifelong fascination with elections, back to my father insisting on walking a five-year old me around our neighbourhood streets in 1950/51 to count the Churchill-resembling bulldog posters in windows, beseeching the passing public to vote Conservative and “Make Britain Great Again”. Sound familiar?
I then – well, eventually – went to university, supposedly to study accountancy and get a ‘good career’.
However, I was hopeless at it, switched to the manifestly more interesting government and politics, and eventually found myself lecturing and writing about it all – and particularly local elections – at Birmingham University’s Institute of Local Government Studies.
Bear with me! This latter position involved extensive contact with not just students, but professional local government officers – and it is this mix of perspectives which prompted my real ambivalence towards the
Government’s May 6th announcement.
We must all be aware that some countries have managed to hold significant public votes during the pandemic – the US, Putin’s referendum in Russia, Catalonia last
Sunday. But just how many, compared to those postponed?
The Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance reckons that since mid-February 2020 at least 105 countries (31 European) have managed to hold national and/or subnational elections and referendums – compared to 75 (25 European) that, like the UK, postponed them, at least initially.
But, where there’s a strong enough will, there’s usually a way, and most of those postponed elections were held at the earliest feasible opportunity in the late summer or autumn – while our democratic priorities were Eating Out.
Italians eat too, but, notwithstanding a Covid death rate rivalling ours, they rescheduled from March to September, and passed with a 70 per cent Yes vote, a constitutional referendum to slash the membership of its two parliamentary chambers – virtually Europe’s largest apart from ours.
Sunday voting hours were stretched into most of Monday, masks required, preferential access for over-65s, but they did it because they deemed it important.
Likewise that beacon of electoral democracy, Russia. President Putin wanted blanket referendum approval
for some 200 amendments to the Russian Constitution, including the banning of same-sex marriage, taking a “responsible attitude” to animals… oh, and allowing Putin to run again for two more six-year presidential terms.
He got it, of course – but in July rather than April, the voting period extended to five days, thermometer screening at polling stations, PPE for all workers. The will was there and it happened. Indeed, of those 25 European postponements, only we – along with Armenia, the Isle of Man and two German states – have yet to rectify them, the sole exception being a few Scottish island by-elections last autumn.
In my personae as politically interested citizen and politics lecturer, I instinctively applaud the importance that all these other countries’ governments, even non-democratic ones, demonstrably attach to the democratic process.
Our – by all international standards – already excessive postponement of elections should be rectified as urgently as possible. Bring them on!
However, in my persona as someone who knows something of how local government works and how successive governments have bypassed and underfunded councils, I worry, because one of the functions for which those councils retain almost entire practical responsibility is electoral administration.
Finding scores of previously unused polling stations, organising floor marking and social distancing barriers, recruiting more than the usual quota of volunteer staff, providing PPE and hand sanitisers – all these, plus the normal updating of electoral registers, managing postal and proxy voting, checking personal identifiers, and the little matter of counting, are council responsibilities.
Yet, despite literally months of potential preparation time, there appears to have been no serious consultation with or guidance from ministers, no legislation for additional voting days, nor (yet) any ring-fenced funding.
Someone did bother to ask them, though – not Ministers, of course, but the Local Government Information Unit.
And its recent survey of 374 chief executives/returning officers, democratic services officers and council leaders found 66 per cent “very concerned” about holding elections in May, 28 per cent “somewhat”, and just 1 per cent “not at all”.
As for when elections should preferably be held, 75 per cent reckoned the autumn or later, with virtually everyone vaccinated, 15 per cent compromised on the summer, with just 10 per cent backing May.
Which sounds to me rather more than just administrators covering their backs, and is legislatively still feasible.