I have to blog this as it has made me so angry this morning.
I am helping Adele organise a great event that will encourage women to vote for the first time in the forthcoming elections. We are getting mock polling booths from the electoral reform group to give women a sneek peek at what is involved in actually voting. But before women can get the benfit of practising making a vote, they will have to ensure they are registered in the first instance. This is no easy task for women who dont have the confidence or skills to fill in the registration form. So we have decided to offer an afternoon of help with filling in electoral registration forms.
To offer the best help to those women who are not registered, I have been looking into how to fill the form in. It is actually quite straight forward. Name, address, etc. But I phoned the electoral registration office this morning to clear up a question I had about section 4:Previous address at which the person was registered to vote.
I dont think the first guy I spoke to had woken up! He passed me on to another man who told me that part 4 is for people who have been registered to vote in the Glasgow area before. When I said that a lot of the people I may be assisting might not have been registered in the area or had never been registered at all before he announced that they would then need to prove who they were! This invloves porducing a driving license or passport AND a copy of a utility bill with the address of the place the person lives and wants to be registered at.
NO WONDER PEOPLE DONT VOTE!!!! I bet you 70% or more, of the women we will be helping to fill in registration forms will not have a driving license or passport. Why do all these organistions expect that everyone has spent, or can afford to spend hundreds of pounds on learning to drive, or that they jet off round the world on holidays after forking out £90 on a passport (that’s how much I heard new passports cost these days, sorry if i’ve made that up!). People who are homeless, living in poverty and all the other disadvantaged people in the country are the poeple who need to vote and have their voices heard and get people to stand up for them, but yet there is all this red-tape that stands in the way.
I can understand that with all this fraud and stuff that happens these days its important to make sure the right people are allowed to vote, and only once. But, come on, it didn’t even mention any of this ID rubbish on the website or the copy of the form I printed off from the website. So, please, policy makers(or who ever it is that decides about the forms) make it easy for us ALL.
Thankyou for letting me get this off my chest. – Back to work.
Kay X
