Because of my former involvement in party politics I have attended a number of election counts, for all levels of election Community, County, Assembly, Westminster and Euro, but until last week I have never attended a preliminary postal vote count.
Of the 300 odd votes cast in the Glan Conwy Community Council election 68 were postal votes. Postal votes are accompanied by a signed declaration by the voter which "proves" that the votes had been validly cast. The declarations are scanned by a computer and the computer highlights those that don't "match" the details on the postal vote application.
The computer rejected a dozen or so votes (a fairly high percentage – about 1 in 5,). My opponent, the returning officer and I then had to visually verify the rejected statements. Most were caused by a failure of the scanning apparatus to distinguish between 9s 6s and 0 in the date of birth section of the declaration, all overturned. Some were cases where a voter had given a sample signature as John Jones but signed the declaration as J Jones, but because the Jones was undoubtedly visually the same, all three of us accepted the signatures as genuine.
Two postal votes were rejected, I thought that both were genuine but the returning officer and the other candidate disagreed with me. One was from a very old voter, I thought that the signature showed deterioration in handwriting fluidity due to age, the others thought that it was another person's signature; the second was from a female voter who was recently married. She had given her sample signature in her maiden name when she applied for a postal vote, but signed in her married name whilst casting this vote.
OK – it was only one vote and it didn't affect the outcome of the election, so in a sense it didn't matter, but it was still a case of a woman being disenfranchised for being a woman and it formed 1/300th of the vote, in some close call constituencies during the last Westminster election one in three hundred votes might have been decisive.
As a bloke I can get divorced tomorrow* and re-marry on Saturday and use the same signature on my postal vote, but my ex-wife reverting to her maiden name and my new wife adopting my name by marriage will both have their votes discounted! That's not fair – is it?
* Note to Mrs MOF - point used as an example not as an intention – honest!
Salmond bumps his gums in ...
19 minutes ago
I think this is partly a symptom of the wider sexist assumption within society that a Woman should change her name once she gets married. Men don;t have to change their names so why should women?
ReplyDeleteI believe it is a hangover from the days when a woman was deemed to be almost the property first of her father then of her husband.
It is a trend that seemed to be dying out in the 1980's and 90's as more and more women were keeping thier original surnames or couples were adopting 'double barrels' meaning that both parties changed their names. And of course many couple chose not to marry at all.
Over the last few years the trend seems to be reversing, I've seen quite a few people get married over the last few years, and the women - successful career women who would probably be regarded as strong feminists in other regards- are taking their husbands names as a matter of course.
Maybe this reflects a rising tide of social conservatism.
The worrying thing about this is that we are now getting to types of voters.
ReplyDeleteThose who opt for a postal vote who will now tend to vote at every election who are not affected by the weather and may well have voted before they have seen what all the candidates have to offer.
Those who vote at poling stations who may be discouraged by the weather or other events. But who may have changed their voting intentions in the days before the election.
Postal votes should be for those who can't make it to a Poling station not because they can't be bothered to go.
Do we want to be elected by the lazy?