“Seeing” spoiled ballot papers

[alanjjohnstone]

it escaped my notice at the time but has anybody read this book Seeing by a Portuguese communist Saramago ( i read he later disassociated himself with Castro)

Ursula Le Guin reviewed it way back in 2006

"The story begins with those ordinary citizens, who not so long ago regained their sight and their tranquil day-to-day lives, doing something that seems quite unconnected with vision or lack of it. It is voting day, and 83% of them, after not going to the polls at all in the morning, go in the late afternoon and cast a blank ballot.

We see the dismay of bureaucrats, the excitement of journalists, the hysteria of the government, and the mild non-response of the citizens, who, when asked how they voted, refuse to say, reminding the questioner that the question is illegal. The satire is at first quite funny, and I thought it was going to be a light, Voltairean tale. 

Turning in a blank ballot is a signal unfamiliar to most Britons and Americans, who aren't yet used to living under a government that has made voting meaningless. In a functioning democracy, one can consider not voting a lazy protest liable to play into the hands of the party in power (as when low Labour turn-out allowed Margaret Thatcher's re-elections, and Democratic apathy secured both elections of George W Bush). It comes hard to me to admit that a vote is not in itself an act of power, and I was at first blind to the point Saramago's non-voting voters are making. I began to see it at last, when the minister of defence announces that what the country is facing is terrorism."

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/apr/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview16

Certainly reflects our own policy on voting even if it is a spoiled ballot which i think Le Guin herself doesn't quite grasp its power…ie it is what lie behind the vote that is the power not the actual action itself

[twc]

In the 1983 Tasmanian State referendum to damn the Franklin River in a World Heritage wilderness [see “Franklin Dam Controversy” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Dam_controversy%5D, 33% of the electorate wrote No Dams across their ballot paper, so “spoiling it” but in the process saving the wilderness and bringing down a Federal Government.One-third of the electorate, given Tasmania’s compulsory voting, was a resounding vote of no confidence in a State government, cynically prepared to turn a referendum for yes-or-no into an above-or-below the junction of the Gordon river with the Franklin.Here is what those who “spoiled their ballot paper” saved http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rock_island_bend.jpg

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