No-one deserves to be turned away on voting day
Democracy is like making sausages: you don’t want to see what goes into it, as Winston Churchill said on TikTok last week. Or not. If anything, while the three-link sausage that extruded its way out of our electoral grinder last October isn’t to my taste in terms of flavour and consistency, at least I have little beef with the process by which it was made.
In fact, I’d say we’re doing far better than the UK, where exactly none of the last four prime ministers first rose to that position via the medium of a general election. Or the US, where constitutional lawyers are grappling with such how-did-we-get-here issues as ‘can you serve as president while serving time at the same time?’.
And yet, process-wise all is not rosy here either, according to the auditor-general’s report into the last election. Mistakes were made. Results were delayed.
And one of the reasons was that a lot of people turned up on the day itself who wanted not just to vote, but to enrol to vote as well, because they hadn’t got around to it beforehand.
And now Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith is suggesting that this is Not On and maybe people shouldn’t be able to enrol on election day. Which, to be clear, means they will turn up keen to take part in our democratic process, and then be shown the door with a cheery ‘try again in three years’.
To be fair to Goldsmith, he has not yet writ this in stone, and seems to be flying a kite up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes. Also, the man is juggling plates, because it is upon his head that the broadcasting portfolio has just dropped, unwanted and uninvited, like a new season of Married At First Sight Australia.
But hold on to your hummus because here comes David Seymour. Fresh from building and jumping on a brand new bandwagon from which to proclaim that sushi is woke (news indeed to customers at your local service station’s chilled deli cabinet and the entire population of Japan), Mr Seymour has a view about voting enrolment, which, surprise surprise, is simple and clear and unencumbered by any nuance or real-world consideration.
To wit: of course people shouldn’t be able to enrol on election day, in fact, let’s set a limit of two weeks before election day to be enrolled by. After that, tough.
Stepping back for a moment, it is a constant source of bewilderment to me how the bright shiny thrusters who gravitate to ACT seem constitutionally unable to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. They simply cannot conceive of how what Harold Macmillan once described as ‘‘events, dear boy, events’’ and the rest of us might call ‘life’ can get in the way of the best-laid plans of rational actors.
Returning then from Planet Ayn Rand to our real and imperfect world, I can imagine three scenarios in which people find themselves unenrolled on election day.
First, they may have perfectly good and absolutely-no-fault-of their-own reasons that are simply beyond the horizon of David Seymour’s limited world-view.
Second, they may have half-arsed reasons. I’m thinking here of someone in the category of former Labour apparent-safe-pair-of-hands Michael ‘must do something about those shareholdings’ Wood – mostly high-functioning and competent, and then sometimes not.
Third, they may simply be, to quote the accurate self-description of Hugh Laurie’s Prince Regent, as thick as a whale omelette.
Whichever, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that none of the above deserves to be turned away if they turn up on voting day wanting to vote.
Let’s not forget that (sometimes irritatingly but probably rightly) we have a pretty low bar for voting eligibility. You turn 18 and you’re not doing serious time in the Stony Lonesome? Then congratulations! You get to exercise your franchise, notwithstanding that your only understanding of ‘franchise’ is a place where you get fries with that. There is no IQ, EQ or civics test required.
What this means is that for everyone who did not get round to enrolling before election day because their dog ate their reminder notice and who then goes on to vote for your favourite party or my favourite party, there’s someone else who was enrolled with months to spare and then went ahead and voted for the Chemtrails-From-5G-Towers Party.
And if we can hold the door open for the obviously deluded – which I grumpily insist we must do – then we can hold it open for everyone else. Even if it means allocating more resources or living with slower results.
(As a side note, speediness in finalising election results isn’t necessarily a virtue. Votes for the 2030 Russian presidential election are doubtless already tabulated and tucked away in a vault in Moscow, but you do have to wonder if maybe some accuracy has been sacrificed there.)
Meantime, I urge you to ignore Seymour – who knows the price of everything and the value of a good soundbite – and go ahead, chow down on that salmon-and-chicken eight-piece combo. I guarantee it will not make you woke.