{"id":5654,"date":"2005-04-11T09:38:11","date_gmt":"2005-04-11T08:38:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/?p=5654"},"modified":"2005-04-11T09:38:11","modified_gmt":"2005-04-11T08:38:11","slug":"spoilt-rotten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/2005\/04\/11\/spoilt-rotten\/","title":{"rendered":"Spoilt rotten"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Gordon gives a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gordonmclean.co.uk\/index.php\/archives\/2005\/04\/11\/crossed\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Gordon\">thoughtful discussion<\/a> of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spoilyourvote.co.uk\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Spoil Your Vote\">Spoil Your Vote campaign<\/a>. I strongly feel that we should have a system in this country that is similar to that in Sweden &#8211; compulsory voting for all citizens (subject to a fixed financial penalty and combined with the introduction of more accessible secure voting methods) but with the addition of a &quot;none of the above&quot; option. Not that that idea on its own would solve the problem of people spoiling their paper or abstaining through laziness or ignorance. It is, at least in part, the duty of politicians to motivate the public to vote. In some instances, a minimum turnout is required for a vote to become valid &#8211; so it is not only the responsibility of the parties to win a majority of the vote but also their responsibility to motivate people into placing their X. Perhaps a combination of obligatory voting to motivate the people and a minimum &quot;turnout&quot; in the form of papers showing a cross against a candidate instead of abstention to motivate the candidates might, when taken together, lead to more meaningful results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gordon gives a thoughtful discussion of the Spoil Your Vote campaign. I strongly feel that we should have a system in this country that is similar to that in Sweden &#8211; compulsory voting for all citizens (subject to a fixed financial penalty and combined with the introduction of more accessible secure voting methods) but with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5654\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grayblog.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}