right to vote

This morning I voted in the European election. I walked to the nearest Church of God branch, five minutes from my home, where the polling station was located, showed my polling card and was handed a ballot, a meter-long sheet of paper in a calming hue of pastel green, folded more expertly than an origami rhinoceros.

I trudged over to the three-sided plywood cubicle that stood in for a voting booth, unfolded the paper artwork in my hand and grabbed the stubby pencil that was attached to a little desk with a piece of string. I was about to make my cross in the right place when something felt wrong. This election, like any that I've ever participated in, is supposed to be free and secret, and here I was standing in a cubicle that was open to the world, at least to the world assembled behind me.

I turned around to check things out. As I had come early there weren't any other voters around. There was only a long table with the four members of the election commission whose job it was to ensure a smooth running of the day's proceedings. These four, two women and two men, were a rough cross-section of the borough's demographics. Two white guys, one clearly English the other possibly of Eastern European origin, were beautifully complemented by an elderly black female and a young Somali with a pious-looking headscarf. Eight eyes were pointed at me with expectation.

I turned back, towards the little desk board with its dangling pencil, my shoulders the only barrier between my right to vote secretly and the world at large. I remembered voting booths with curtains, flimsy, for sure, and destined for the bin at the end of the day but positively opaque. It was empowering to pull the curtain behind my back to exercise my democratic right without interference.

This morning, I was standing in plain view. When I heard another citizen enter the polling station, I took the advantage of what I imagined to be the election committee's momentary distraction and quickly put the pencil to paper, making a mark of two intersecting lines next to the name of the party I had chosen the night before.

Not having a TV and not reading newspapers much, I'm somewhat disconnected from the world of advertisements, commercial and political. Throughout the campaign, however long it went on for, I had received only one solicitation for my vote. It was a poorly targeted effort of political supplication by the United Kingdom Independence Party, a fiercely anti-European outfit that participates in this election with the sole goal of getting this country out of Europe.

It baffles me that someone would doubt the benefits of European integration. My current and previous jobs being two of them, they are blatantly obvious to me. But numerous are those who see things differently. When the previous European election was held in the blissful year of 2004, UKIP was the third most successful British party. Will it come to this again? Surely no one can be ignorant enough to support British isolation in the current economic climate where the fall in trade and transnational economic synergism is one of the most detrimental factors of the global recession. Surely? The numbers will be out on Sunday.

You guessed correctly that I didn't vote for UKIP. Who did I vote for? The night before the election, I asked myself a related but much more fundamental question. Who can I vote for? Who is running? From the news on the radio, I know that there are three major parties in the UK, Labor, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Either one of the first two has always run the country. The third is weighed down by a reputation of highly original and sometimes impractical thinking, ill-suited to the successful practice of politics.

Because of their notoriety and ostracization by the civilized parts of society, I was also aware of the British National Party who wants to kick foreigners out of the country and can therefore not expect my vote. Having applied for my consideration, the UKIP was also in my sphere of awareness. That makes it five. On the BBC I learned that a grand total of nearly two dozen parties, ranging from the staid to the nutty, have fielded candidates somewhere in the UK. I also learned that most parties are obscure for a good reason. Wai D, for example, promises that "if elected, candidates will undertake at their own expense the creation of an internet site where people can express their opinions." That's a fine thing, but does anyone need a party for that?

What does anyone need parties for anyway, I was wondering as I folded the ballot paper up, dropped it into the box and left the polling station. And what are elections for? Most people don't make election decisions rationally, oftentimes voting in near complete ignorance of the contents of their chosen party's program and sometimes in open defiance of their true preferences. I know this because I have done this myself.

Four years ago, before the last German general election, I made use of a web application developed by the country's major news magazine that asked a few dozen political questions and collected my answers. In the end, parties were ranked by how well their programs matched my preferences as expressed in my answers. One party stood out of a sea of others with similar scores. I voted for one of the others because I didn't think the one would represent me well. It won anyway.

This year, even though I'm not voting in Germany, I gave the elect-o-mat another try. It suggested another party, one that I had never seriously considered before but one whose rough equivalent in the UK I've found uncannily appealing ever since I've lived here. I don't know what they stand for or what they would do if they won – certainly not setting up a website for people to express their opinion and certainly not clubbing foreigners out of this country – but I gave them my vote. In the end, one party will win and the two dozen others will gracefully accept defeat, and this is the essence of democracy as I see it. Great thing it is.