B.A.Ware

As far as i know the numbers on the ballot paper cannot be traced to the voter.

Alex McKee

They can, when you go in to register to vote they take your electoral number and write down the number of the ballot paper they give you.

Basically it's secret insofar that the information isn't public knowledge, but I think that it is secured by the council and not disclosed without need, so if the council is being investigated for failure to prevent electoral fraud they will release the information.

B.A.Ware

When i go to vote one person ticks you of a list and another person gives you a ballot paper, neither write anything down.

arden forester

Paul This is a bit over the top, don't you think?

Democracy itself is not immoral - it's what people do with it! And as for coercing, we all need leaders to lead groups in order for anything to happen. Mass decision-making leads to anarchy.

So by all means encourage voter turnout but not fining them for deciding to boycott a poll. This government is zealously keen on targets, bans, exemptions, penalties, orders, and enforcement! The reason why people don't vote in numbers is because the three main parties are all chasing the same voter constituency. Labour was seen as being marginally better than the Tories, who in turn were slightly better than the Libdems!

It was all so easy when the Tories could suggest that the country was in peril with Labour and their commie friends and Labour could suggest that the Tories were fat capitalists with a down on the workers! :wink:

Alex McKee

I've taken it up with my local electoral officer. I have suspicions that it isn't right that they were doing it, and labour practically own my polling station.

WindupMerchant

What BAware has said is right, there is no way that the ballot paper has a number on it, that can be cross referenced to the voter, because if that sort of thing is correct, democracy in this country is dead.
It will be interesting to find out what the response of the Electoral Commission is from your enquiry Alex.

UKIP MAN

Paul Birch

You are possibly confusing democracy with representative government. They are fundamentally different. In theory one can have a government of honest representatives violating no rights and claiming no authority ever to do so. By contrast, the principle of democracy - in essence, that a majority may do anything it wants - is thoroughly evil. It is the absolute or arbitrary rule of the General Will, the very opposite of limited or constitutional government. Throughout history democracy or populism has been recognised as one of most dangerous forms of government, the death of the polis as tyranny is of monarchy; immense efforts have been devoted to preventing the polis from decaying INTO phpbb_a democracy (usually in vain). The US Constitution, for example, was explicitly formulated to stop the new republic falling INTO phpbb_democracy (it failed). The UK is supposed to have representative government; it is not supposed to be a democracy, though for the past century politicians, for their own purposes, have done their best to obscure the distinction.

Leaders lead. They don't coerce.

There is of course a need to be ready to coerce in order to uphold the law and defend the rights of persons in that society. But such coercion is not a good thing in itself; it is justifiable only as a counter to the deliberate wrongdoing of others. Unfortunately, politics in action is almost invariably about seeking power to coerce at other people's expense and in defiance of their rights.

If only it did!

Paul Birch

I seem to have put the cat among the pigeons. Let me emphasise that I didn't mean to imply that the way you vote actually is recorded, merely that the technique used for authenticating ballots means that it could be. That is, your vote is "confidential" rather than "secret".

However, it is far from clear than under representative government (not democracy - see post immediately above), ballots ought to be secret. John Stuart Mill argued strongly in "Representative Government" that they should be made public - openly published. A man should not vote in ways he would be ashamed to have known. On balance I tend to agree with him (though there are a number of objections, on the lines of threats and undue influence, that evidently escaped him)