Voting

In my world voting in elections is compulsory.  Even in my head I consider it to be a civic obligation, a right that has been hard won by our forefathers and foremothers and which we have a strong duty to take advantage of.  I believe firmly that if you choose not to vote and someone truly horrible gets elected then by your indolence you have colluded in their election.  But it was nevertheless very difficult to know what to do yesterday.

The government, in its wisdom, decided a while ago that with the notable exception of London, all local authorities should have elected police commissioners. Nobody, apart from, I assume, a few people in the government, really seems to understand what these elected police commissioners are going to be doing . Nobody really knew anything about the candidates.  I do not believe that we need elected police commissioners - the previous system seemed to work perfectly well and it seemed an unneccessary and very large expense at a time when money could be spent on other, more useful things.  But the election had been called, we had voting cards and my conscience pricked everytime I thought that maybe I wouldn't bother.

So I had a quick trawl on the internet yesterday to see if I could find any information at all about Derbyshire's candidates. And The Builder and I, voting cards in paw, duly attended the Tupton Village Hall and cast our votes.  At the time we arrived (around 17:15) only 60 of around 1000 eligible voters had bothered to turn up.  So we fulfilled a useful purpose at least in that we gave the election officials someone to talk to.  Briefly! 

Then we left them to it and went home for a warming glass of wine and homemade salmon fish fingers, oven chips and veg.  The poor election officials were stuck in their empty and chilly Village Hall until after 22:00 (and they had been there since before 07:00 when voting opened).