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Anyone else considering spoiling their ballot in the next election? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by K3zi4@lemmy.world to c/uk_politics

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Don't get me wrong, I will probably cave at the last minute and vote SNP again for a number of reasons. Mostly, being supportive of a number of their progressive policies that I have benefited from over the years, and also because my constituency is a two horse race between them and the Tories who I will never vote for. Though the SNP are probably now at their lowest point in years since they finally managed to oust Sturgeon.

I will also never vote Labour, they have no identity here and during the 2019 election they were campaigning for the Tories to oust SNP here, so 100% fuck them too.

I once voted for Lib Dem and we ended up with the catastrophic Clegg/Cameron coalition (though due to FPTP my vote didn't matter there.)

I would like to vote for Green, but it would be a wasted vote here.

It's just bizarre to me that Westminster's voting system is such that a vast majority of votes in the UK are binned, how is this considered normal?

Sorry for the rant, but I am just so incredibly disillusioned with politics in this shitehole of a country but absolutely refuse to be passive about it since that is what they want us to be.

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[–] BrightCandle@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

When they are reading out the results they do say how many spoiled ballots there were, the problem is the BBC et el usually cut off just as that is being read and they don't count it across the country or keep the results and as the results start coming in faster you don't hear it. The spoiled ballots doesn't seem to make it into any of the official stats for an election that I can see. So unfortunately its one of those acts that ought to be better than not voting but in practice turns out to be basically the same.

I certainly wont be voting for the Conservatives or Labour but as far as protests go I am better off voting for another party that wont win as a protest than spoiling the ballot as it will be more visible and included in all the stats.

[–] Devi@kbin.social 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

My parents used to do election counting, they don't count spoiled ballots, they just get thrown away.

[–] K3zi4@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I had heard the opposite from local counting volunteers. I was told that the MPs are told how many spoiled ballots there were as that is key analytics to knowing how many undecided voters they failed to win over.

Maybe that's not the case anymore and a spoiled ballot doesn't have the same message.

[–] Devi@kbin.social 1 points 5 months ago

I've done a bit of research and apparently there's a stat kept of the 'uncounted' ballots, this includes spoiled ballots, ones incorrectly filled in, ones that get damaged, etc.