Postscript

I'm not really a 'real time' blogger. I don't really respond to events as they occur. At least that hadn't been the case until earlier this week, when I responded to my own organisational stupidity with a post hoping (genuinely in my despair and self-anger) to persuade someone serious enough to register but casual enough not to bother, that they should vote because I was going to fail to do so (due to nothing other than poor personal organisation). Due to the brilliance of the internet and the vagueries of Twitter, I find a reference to one the greatest television shows ever made lends unjustified weight to my simple attempts to vent at my own stupidity via my smartphone.
I feel like I need to go off piste a bit here and explain a ridiculous amount about the multi-party system in Britain to (both of) my US audience, but I think they'd probably understand it fine if I just explain that the popular press can't count above two. Hence most people in the UK aren't actually aware of the multi-party system.
Perhaps more embarrassingly, I made a plea (to my 20 Twitter followers) for more people to vote, and on Thursday night the radio said we averaged 33% voter turnout in the local elections across the country.
I would love to say shame on you, but it is shame on me. I can blog and tweet about this stuff all I like, but when it came to it I was not in the polling booth. I disenfranchised myself, along with 77% of the over 18s in this country*, although, in my defence, I did so not through an active desire to abstain, or as passive indecision, but through gross incompetence that I blame myself for. That is the only way, in the 16 years I have been allowed to, that I have found not to vote. I genuinely don't know how the rest of you live with yourselves.
'Largely, very comfortably' I would imagine to be the answer, except I doubt it is so. Increasingly disaffection with mainstream politics means that people in western democracies don't bother to vote, and like me, they wake up the next day with the impression that their inaction has changed nothing. Even without their vote, the system has perpetrated itself and government has prevailed. This is a very dangerous assumption. As has been proven time after time, voter apathy allows politicians with a small but motivated following to get elected and change things, and even when minority or extreme parties don't win out, the establishment can use voter apathy as an excuse to create their own (totally crappy) mandate. I wouldn't be massively surprised if many of the horror stories we have read about dodgy politicians have gone a fair way to actually consolidating their positions. Whilst the fair cannot always rely on the 'casual' voter, the corrupt can always rely on their cronies.
What has all this got to do with my plea for someone to vote as my randomly selected proxy? I guess in a way some people would see what I attempted to do as a form of subversion of the democratic processes. If I'd done a full 'Donna Moss' and wondered the streets around the polling station trying to get people to vote, I wonder how long it would have been before someone complained. But actually I couldn't do anything more subversive than encourage people not to vote. I did not attempt to unfairly influence people's opinion in favour of one candidate or another, I simply tried to encourage them to vote. Was I successful? I don't know, I rather suspect that the few people who do read my blog were all going to vote anyway. Certainly no one got in touch to say they were going to vote purely out of sympathy for my predicament, in an attempt to redress the balance as it were. Because it is a balance, and choosing not to vote shifts that balance. By not voting, we are not abstaining, we are giving undue weight to the votes of those who do. I guess that's what's bugging me most, but I've no one to blame but myself. I guess next time I just need to be more organised. Or befriend people who are more casual about their voting.

*This is a forced statistic, as all of the voting age public were not voting tonight - this round of local elections is for certain types of council only.