On 4 Jun 2015, at 00:41, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 3 June 2015 at 19:11, Michael Peel <email@mikepeel.net mailto:email@mikepeel.net> wrote:
On 3 Jun 2015, at 23:48, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 3 June 2015 at 18:42, Michael Peel email@mikepeel.net wrote:
By the way, my understanding is that the practice of generating a
public
list of voters who cast ballots, while keeping the nature of their
votes
private, is relatively common in election processes in general. In the United States, political parties use this information for their "get
out
the vote" campaigns so that they know which of their likely supporters
have
yet to vote.
In UK political elections I think that would be illegal...{{citation needed}}
They certainly exist in Canada, and I'm quite certain they exist in the
UK
as well, because that's how the official poll watchers (or scrutineers,
as
we call them in Canada) know who to "get out" when getting out the vote. They don't get published online, but there is a right to examine the list of individuals who can vote at the office of the local senior election official for a few weeks afterward, and then at the national election office once any challenges have been completed. Of course in places where voting is mandatory, the failure to vote is going to be
public.
Wow. I'm very far from being an expert on the UK voting system, but my understanding is that although the list of who can vote may be made public (where voters have agreed to this), who has not yet voted (or, after the fact, who has not voted) would never be made public. In the UK, election scrutineers would only be involved in reviewing votes that had been cast, not who had not voted.
It occurred to me that there's this really great online reference source called Wikipedia that's generally pretty accurate when it comes to things like this, so I looked up "Electoral roll". In the UK, "[a]fter an election a 'Marked Register' can be inspected, which is a copy of the register used for the election with a mark by each elector that has voted."[1]
As I said...while it's generally accurate, sometimes it's incomplete. I note the absence of any information about Canada there, although it is fairly close to the UK system as discussed in the article.
Risker/Anne
Interesting! It doesn't seem to be referenced in the enwp article (I've just tagged it as needing a citation), but I'll look into in on the morrow!
(All I wanted to do when I sent my first email was to point out that it wasn't clearly indicated that the record of who voted in this election would be made public, even though I have no issue with it being public, but let's argue about this anyway!)
Thanks, Mike (Apologies for the sarcasm. It's been a long day.)