voting

Council Disenfranchisement

Like much of the UK, there are local elections where I live next month. After coming home from a week of Three Rings volunteering I found my poll card on the doormat. Can you spot the bleeding-obvious mistake?

This’ll be the first election for which I’ve needed to bring photographic ID to the polling station. That shouldn’t be a problem: I have a passport and driving license and whatnot.

But just to be absolutely certain, I had the local council – the same people who issued me the polling card! – supply me with a voter authority certificate:

So now I’m in a pickle. West Oxfordshire District Council are asking me to produce photo ID in the wrong name when I turn up at a polling station next month. It doesn’t even match the name on the photo ID that they themselves issued me.

This would be less-infuriating were it not for the fact that they had my name wrong in the same way on an electoral roll form they sent me in August 2022¹. When I contacted them to have them fix it, they promised that the underlying problem was solved² so this very thing wouldn’t happen.

And yet here we are.

Hopefully they’ll be able to fix their records promptly or else I guess I’ll have to apply for a proxy vote, to allow the ballot of my imaginary friend “Dan Que” to be cast by me, Dan Q, instead.

And if that isn’t the most bizarre form of election fraud you’ve ever heard of, I don’t know what is.

¹ They’d had my name right before August 2022, including on previous poll cards; I can only assume that some human operator “corrected” it to the wrong thing at some point.

² They didn’t fix the problem immediately in August 2022. Initially, they demanded that I produce proof of my change of name from “Dan Que” (which has, of course, never been my name!) to “Dan Q”, and only later backed down and admitted that they’d made a mistake and would correct the PII they were holding about me.

Gerrymandering

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

How the manipulation of boundaries can adjust voting outcomes.

DataGenetics

What I Learned About Democracy, Injury, Packing & Friendship

It’s was a busy weekend; the first of several, I’m sure. Mostly – put briefly – it’s been spent thusly:

Democracy: I’ll be voting “Yes” on Thursday’s referendum, and you should too (unless you’ve already been persuaded or are even helping with the fight). And while I’ve not had as much opportunity to help get this message out as Ruth and JTA have, I’ve tried to do my bit by joining them for a spot of leafleting over the weekend. I’m not entirely in favour of some of the campaign tactics being used (like the separate “Labour Yes” and “Conservative Yes” campaigns which act as if one another don’t exist: to me, whether or not we adopt AV has nothing to do with parties or candidates and everything to do with it just being a better way of representing the opinion of the voters), but I guess that they’re necessary to get the point across to some folks. And this slight spindoctoring quickly pales in the light of some of the lies that the no-to-AV campaigners are telling.

Injury: Not to me, this time, but to my father, who came off his bike while cycling around Scotland this weekend. I’ve not had the chance to talk to him since they pushed back his surgery (he’s broken parts of himself and they want to turn him into a cyborg put a metal plate in him, or something) until later this week. Right now, then, he’s confined to hospital, which I can’t imagine he’s enjoying very much. If they’ve hooked you up with Internet access, dad – get well soon.

Packing: Oh, so much packing. I got started on boxing up all of the board games, the other day, only to find out that there were quite a few more of them than I remembered. I’ve also started on my collection of cables and computer knick-knacks, and discovered that I have no fewer than five male-to-male VGA cables. Why? I’ve no idea. I’ve been gradually cutting down on my spare supplies (do I really need three spare floppy drive cables when I don’t use any floppy disks?), but it’s hard: the very next day after I throw them out, you can guarantee that’ll be the moment I need one of my many AT-to-PS2 keyboard adapters.

Friendship: A couple of weeks ago I met Adrian, an international student from the USA who’s been in Oxford for a year or so for the final year of zer^* study. Ze and I ‘clicked’ and formed an immediate connection, instantly getting along remarkably well. We spent a little of this weekend together, and for a moment there, it seemed like there might be the potential for a romantic connection, too. But sadly, by the time we got into gear ze had only two days left in the UK before jetting off back home to the States… and 3,900 miles is a long, long way. We both agreed that we should have met a year ago, but c’est la vie: the world is smaller, these days, thanks to the Internet, so there’s every chance of building an online friendship, punctuated those rare occasions when we happen to be in one another’s country.

^* It’s a gender-neutral pronoun, if you haven’t come across one before (and as I usually only find myself using them in the context of BiCon, you’d be forgiven). Aside from their linguistic benefits in politically-correct society, they’re often favoured by those whose gender identity is neither male nor female.

The title of this blog post is, of course, a reference to What I Learned About Ego, Opinion, Art & Commerce, a fantastic 2001 Goo Goo Dolls compilation album.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #40:

Fail to get elected as one of the two student representatives of module CS12320 (Concepts In Programming). What else could I expect? I was nominated against my will, gave an awe-inspiring speech, that declared that “if I get this position, I’ll slaughter every last one of you with a pick-axe” brought up the issue that “hell – I’m not even representative of myself; why do you want me to represent you lot?”, and made clear “I want this role as little as you want me to have it!”. I think they got the idea. I recieved a grand total of 0 votes, and that includes the ones from the people who nominated me (who, after hearing my speech, voted for somebody else). Victory

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Footnotes