DEMOCRACY RULES

A close ac­quain­tance of mine re­ceived the call to sit at an elec­toral table in his local polling sta­tion in these last mu­nic­i­pal elec­tions. He was pretty miffed at the whole idea, not be­cause he was miss­ing a lazy Sun­day day off, but be­cause he ac­tu­ally had an­other job for the whole week­end that he would have re­ceived a lot more money for than the 70 euros paid for com­ply­ing with his civic duty. It does seem strange to me that some­one who can jus­tify not at­tend­ing due to work com­mit­ments is still obliged to do it, when so many peo­ple would be quite happy to earn a leisurely 70 euros tick­ing names off a reg­is­ter all day.

Un­for­tu­nately, when I in­formed my ac­quain­tance of my opin­ion, he turned al­most pur­ple with rage at my de­scrip­tion of how he had spent his Sun­day. In his words, it had ac­tu­ally been the worst job he’d had to do in his life. Firstly, be­cause there’d been a cock-up with the num­bers. Al­though you would’ve thought that num­bers per table should be more or less equal in a polling sta­tion, while all of the other ta­bles in his sta­tion had around 400 names and never a hint of a queue all day long, his had 973 and long queues of im­pa­tient peo­ple all morn­ing and most of the rest of the day.

Also, three peo­ple are as­signed to each table, in­clud­ing the pres­i­dent, but if the lat­ter is ex­tremely re­luc­tant to be there and also very stressed out due to hav­ing a child to care for, then ap­par­ently that per­son will do very lit­tle to help and just spend the day com­plain­ing, while you and your col­league do all the hard work.

One slightly dis­turb­ing anec­dote in­volved a very se­nior voter whose daugh­ter had sent him to my ac­quain­tance’s table and seem­ingly aban­doned him there, even though he didn’t ap­pear on the list. The gen­tle­man in ques­tion wasn’t al­lowed to vote and sat around for the best part of an hour until some­one fig­ured out that he was ac­tu­ally at the wrong polling sta­tion, even though his daugh­ter’s com­puter had said oth­er­wise.

It turned out that a lot of peo­ple weren’t on the list be­cause they were going to their local polling sta­tion but were still reg­is­tered at their old one be­cause the lists only in­cluded those reg­is­tered in the neigh­bour­hood up until Feb 1 of this year, and pre­sum­ably they had not com­pleted the nec­es­sary pa­per­work to be switched.

A fur­ther com­plaint by my ac­quain­tance was that there is no tech in­volved to help, so he had to write down 650 names on paper by hand. But by far the worst as­pect of it from my view­point is that he was at the table from 8 am to 10.30 pm with only one 30-minute break to go out and grab a bite to eat. When I told him that can’t be right, he just said that there was no one in charge so he had to fol­low the pres­i­dent’s lead, and he didn’t want to deal with her given the mood she was in.

And to round off a joy­less elec­toral day for him, there was the count­ing process at the end of it all, which if you were lucky did not in­volve en­coun­ter­ing pieces of food such as salami stuffed in your en­velopes (ap­par­ently not as un­usual as you’d think).

So the big ques­tion: does my ac­quain­tance think the de­mo­c­ra­tic process is trust­wor­thy? Ab­solutely, he said, if any­thing it’s too strict, and he doesn’t want to be called up for it ever again.

Opin­ion