Kissing your Ballot

How I plan to use my vote tomorrow in the UK General Election, and why.

Everything that follows is written in a personal capacity and not in conjunction with any organisation I am associated with.

Tomorrow the United Kingdom has a general election and I will take my polling card out for a walk. I must remember to take identification too, and I’ll do that with some regret, and for the first time since the law was changed with the express intention of disenfranchising people. I will enter a polling booth at St Stephen’s church near my home in Putney in South West London. I will thank people doing their civic duty who pass me my ballot paper. I will enjoy it when they gesture towards the semi-privacy of the polling booths as if there might be somewhere else to go. I will take delight and pride in playing my part in the great democratic ritual.

And I’ll think about where to place my pencil.

Before I say what I plan to do with the pencil, let me say something important.

People fight and die for democracy every day, not least on the front lines of Ukraine. Many have fought for decades with everything they had, such as hunger strikes, to establish the principle of universal suffrage. When your nation-state asks everyone to decide who should govern us, it is time to show up as a citizen. Being part of ‘the people’ who choose government is no small thing. I am not taking the right to vote for granted at all. Everyone should vote. I even believe in compulsory voting.

So I am not apathetic about democracy, but paradoxically, I don’t want to be complicit in tacitly conferring legitimacy on our anti-democratic voting system, First Past the Post (FPTP).

This is not the time to offer another critique of our electoral system, nor inform you of its dodgy history, but it’s an outdated and frankly embarrassing way to ask people how they want to be governed. Briskly, the problem is that we always have minority rule, that some votes matter much more than others, that millions go unrepresented, that only marginal seats are really relevant, that people’s views are misrepresented because people are disincentivised from voting for who they want to because the vote will be wasted. Perhaps especially important for me, political innovation is stifled by FPTP at a time when we need it more than ever, because it is relatively easy for new parties to get dispersed support, but very hard to get sufficiently concentrated support in one area, unless you campaign exclusively on a local issue (and even then you’re likely to lose). Dispersed support gets you nowhere under our system.

A UK general election pretends to be about an alphabet of perspectives, but in most cases, the only meaningful choice on offer to constituents is between A and B, neither of which you might like. Your vote for C or D is invariably ineffective, and a vote for E is only likely to matter to E, who may or may not lose their deposit. In many cases A is guaranteed to win; so sometimes even voting for B makes no difference because what counts for power is who wins your seat, not the national vote share. It’s a really bad system. The only redeeming features of FPTP are that people are allowed to periodically get rid of governments they don’t like, and that governments are relatively unencumbered by having to, ahem, represent the people. This is why they call it “an elective dictatorship”, and that’s what we are about to have in the UK.

But my protest is not just about the voting system. I also don’t want to lend my support to a prospective government that does not feel like a meaningful transformation of perspective to speak to the challenges of our times, but more like a changing of the guard that perpetuates the status quo. In the three-horizon model, tomorrow’s general election feels like an encounter with The H2minus Vortex - the kind of change that is really about staying the same. I have been asking myself what an ‘H2+’ vote pointing towards transformation would feel like - the kind of change that is actually transformative.

I am just one person, but it’s a sacred duty to use whatever power we have as well as we can. So with the context of 2024 in mind, and the context of my particular constituency in mind, I have decided I will “spoil my ballot”.

*

The language of ‘spoiling’ is unfortunate, pejorative, and tendentious. ‘Spoiling’ implies a missed opportunity and is used to describe an attempted vote that is registered but not as an actual vote. Many spoilt ballots will indeed be accidental, but mine will not be. The deliberate ‘spoiling’ of ballots is an established act of civil disobedience in the spirit of conscientious objectors, and those doing it believe the ballot they are asked to complete is already, in a sense, spoilt, because it renders their vote irrelevant. If you don’t show up to vote, people are right to imagine that you simply don’t care, but if you ‘spoil your ballot’ you are part of the conversation, albeit a dissonant part. There is currently no way to recognise which spoilt ballots are intentionally spoilt, but what matters is that you emerge from the voting booth with a clear conscience, knowing you have acted in good faith.

I propose we call the deliberate spoiling of ballots as an expression of political conscience something else. It might simply be called ‘adorning your ballot’ or maybe ‘kissing your ballot’. I don’t mean literally kissing, though why not? I mean it more figuratively as an act of love. You could also call it simply ‘greeting your ballot’ or perhaps more grandly: ‘sacrificing your vote to protect democracy’ (though that sounds a bit Orwellian). I am not sure, but it’s definitely not about spoiling anything, other than perhaps an illusion of democratic agency.

*

Every voter’s situation is different, and I do not recommend my approach for everyone.

I feel politically homeless because it is hard to aggregate my views in one party, and none of the parties are contending with the metacrisis. I have written before about being progressive, though I am also in some ways a liberal, a conservative, a social democrat, a nationalist, and even an anarchist. None of these labels really work because I have also become a metamodernist and somehow the conversation I am interested in is metapolitical rather than political, as expressed in The Flip, The Formation and the Fun.

So the ‘what’ matters, but so does the ‘where’. A great deal depends on where you live. If you think your vote could make a difference between one person getting elected or not getting elected (many vote negatively in that sense) then you should of course vote for the party that reflects your view.¹

We know that the Labour Party is as good as certain to win a majority of seats at the general election, and perhaps even win a so-called ‘super majority’ (two-thirds), so all votes should be made with that context in mind. Opinion polls can be wrong, but there are corroborating factors and they are rarely wrong by more than their margin of error. More generally, our civic duty is to understand the voting system and think through what follows for how we express our preferences. The idea that we should not think too much about it and just vote for the party that we like the most seems to me patronising, immature and irresponsible. It is the politics of Neverland, a place where people don’t grow up.

In my constituency of Putney, the Labour Party candidate Fleur Andersen has odds of 99% to win this constituency. Fleur appears to be a good MP, I have met her, and wish her well at a personal level. I think the Conservative party has misgoverned the country very badly now for fourteen years, and I doubt I could ever vote for them, even if Rory Stewart somehow returned to politics to lead them. I am glad in one sense that we have an apparently competent MP in waiting who will support an apparently competent government in waiting, but this year I find myself unable to vote for the Labour party.²

*

So what then am I to do? Should I vote for the Green Party as a nod to my years working on climate change? I have done that before, but I have lost faith in what it is supposed to convey. National vote share is purely aesthetic and makes no tangible difference to outcomes, and we have decades of evidence of that. The First Past the Post system actually depends on its legitimacy for the idea that voting for a party that can’t win in your seat is a meaningful act, but I have come to believe that is more like being complicit in perpetuating an anti-democratic system.

I could vote for Labour anyway because it’s fun to back a winner, but as indicated in the second footnote below, I have several reasons not to. I could vote for a random local candidate who never had a chance to win, but wants to feel involved, just as a friendly pat on the back. I would even vote for Count Bin Face if I could because I believe he is metamodern in spirit, but he’s only standing in a constituency (Richmond and Northallerton) where I cannot vote. It all feels a bit desperate.

None of my available options are satisfactory, then. They all feel H2minus and tokenistic in different ways. All the so-called “use your vote” consolation options feel hollow this year, and they all carry the self-perpetuating tendencies of the status quo. None of my conventional options reflect how I think and feel, and to choose any of them feels worse than not voting.

I believe the best and most democratic thing I can do with my vote (in my context) is to offer a protest vote against our anti-democratic voting system and against the lack of a serious attempt to face up to our metacrisis. And the only way to do that is to adorn my ballot, not with a cross in the ‘right’ place, but writing in the ‘wrong’ place.

So when I get my ballot I will write somewhere in the margins:

In this constituency, with this voting system, I do not find anyone I want to vote for, and it does not matter who I choose to vote for, so I prefer that my presence as a citizen is noted, but my vote is not allocated. I do this to protest against an anti-democratic voting system that does not even attempt to ensure my views are represented with proportionality, and to use the gift of my existing vote to ask for a more meaingful vote in future.

That statement is a little long, yes. In future years I hope it might be transmuted into a single word or a symbol and become more widespread. I know that nobody will record these words I write, and by themselves, they will make no difference. But I will know what I did, and my readers will know they are there. I find this approach a more meaningful use of my agency than any of the other options open to me.

If you live in the UK, good luck making your choice tomorrow.

1. If I lived in Brighton or Bristol West I would vote for The Green Party because I want them to have a bigger voice in parliament. If I lived in Chingford & Woodford Green I would vote for the independent Faiza Shaheen because she was treated so badly by the Labour party machine and she speaks for a valuable socialist perspective that at least needs to be part of the conversation, but has been purged. If I lived in a marginal seat in the West Country I would vote Liberal Democrat, mostly because they believe in proportional representation and will probably unseat Conservatives who have harmed the UK (Which is not to say all Conservative MPs have). If voting Labour would help unseat an arcitecht of the misinformation that led to Brexit I would vote Labour. If voting for a Conservative MP would help avoid a Reform MP getting elected I would vote Conservative becuase it’s a lesser evil. If I lived in a marginal seat in Scotland, I would probably vote SNP because I believe in principle in supporting Scottish independence (though the details and timing matter). In such places your vote really makes a difference, but in most places it does not.

2. I am troubled by their tacit support for genocide in Gaza (it’s complicated, yes, but that’s roughly how I see it). Even with political pragmatism in mind, I feel disappointed Labour have lacked the courage and conviction to speak more openly about rebuilding our relationship with the EU. I feel they have betrayed Scotland by not supporting a referendum when the Scottish parliament voted for one. I felt their eleventh hour deselection of Faiza Shaheen augured poorly for their controlling tendencies with a large majority. I feel they are putting temporary self-interest ahead of longer-term national interest by not seeking to change the electoral system for future elections. I find it hard to trust or like Keir Starmer whom I believe will become more authoritarian over time. Above all, I am bemused and disappointed that in 2024 the heart of Labour’s prospectus is economic growth. I believe it is delusional to rely on growth, and ultimately harmful, as I have argued elsewhere, and we have no time to lose in changing course.