On 4 Jun 2015, at 00:41, Risker
<risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 3 June 2015 at 19:11, Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net
<mailto:email@mikepeel.net>> wrote:
On 3 Jun 2015, at 23:48, Risker
<risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 3 June 2015 at 18:42, Michael Peel <email(a)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