Today is National Voter Registration Day, a day which has been named as part of the Bite the Ballot campaign. As the website explains, this is “a party neutral movement on a mission to empower young voters”. Anything that carries support from all Political Parties and also those like me who believe that we also need an alternative which avoids the dominance of Political Parties in our public institutions, must be worth supporting. The challenge with electoral change including deciding to vote is that few of us want to spend time thinking about democracy until it is clear our actions will make a difference. This point is often missed by the people who represent us at Parliament or in our local Council Chamber. Sadly far too often we get the impression that many of them only want our views in a manner that has no bearing on their subsequent actions, unless of course they are wanting to claim later that they made their decisions because of local pressure or consultation. This makes encouraging people to register some months before an election is due an even greater challenge.

Truthfully most Political decisions in the UK get taken in a cold auditorium (or worse, behind closed doors) when public interest is negligible. As one of the few people who regularly watches Parliament on TV or via the internet, and has visited Parliament at a time when the debate was not one that had great interest to most people it is clear that if more people realised just how few MPs or Peers actually participate at such times, we would want to change our system, and change it now. The same is true at a local level where the amount of posturing and pontification, let alone the use of speeches written in advance and read as if no debate had actually taken place would leave many of us disturbed at the process that changes our lives on a regular basis. The costs of running these arrangements is also significant and we cannot claim that we didn’t know! I suspect that few people ever acknowledge when our representatives have done what we consider to be a good job and inevitably there are many issues which matter intensely to a small group of people, leading to the 1000’s of lobbying groups in the UK. This must make it difficult for the representatives to really know how the majority of their electors feel on most of the issues that they are asked to decide upon. Perhaps it is understandable that some of them are very resistant to listening to the views of people who do have concerns about certain pieces of legislation.

Despite this reality, if we are going to inspire young people and indeed people of all ages to register to vote, let alone to exercise this vote, more work is needed to help all of us to understand how we can participate in the democratic process in a more effective manner than a 4 or 5 year electoral cycle. I recall during the Police and Crime Commissioner elections, the candidate who went on to win in Sussex proudly explaining that if she did not do a good enough job, she would be accountable to residents in May 2016. Thankfully she has adapted her behaviour significantly since the hustings meetings and presented herself in many settings to people who have no doubt expressed their comments in an honest manner on many of the issues she is responsible for. The extent to which these comments have actually affected her decision making is far less clear. The right to vote is known as Suffrage or the Political Franchise. If this was measured in the terms of a commercial franchise, many of our political institutions would be in the late stages of insolvency.

It is vital that we do encourage young people to register to vote, and Bite the Ballot is a great campaign for us all to support. The hashtags for the campaign are #NVRD is not the most inspiring but it is at least short and to the point and #takepower which is a bit more energetic! Do consider using one or the other, and also following @bitetheballot