Is it better to spoil your paper or just not vote?

[cremeeggsonboxingday]

I am really struggling with deciding who to vote for tomorrow in the local election. To be honest, I can't bring myself to vote for any of them. I'm just wondering what would be the best way to make an impact. Would a low voter turn out send a message or would it be better to write exactly what I think of them all on my paper?

Yabu = don't vote
Yanbu = spoil your paper

Neither of them would make any impact whatsoever. The only way you can have any impact is by voting for your preferred, or least-disliked candidate.
If you bother to go in and write what you think of them all on the ballot paper, don’t kid yourself that you’re doing something really clever. One person at most will read it.
If you can’t bring yourself to vote for anyone then just don’t bother - the effect you have will be no different.

Why would a politician care about anything other than whether you vote for them or someone else?

If you spoil your paper it will count as a spoiled vote

Pick the best of a bad bunch. Otherwise the only message you’re sending is you don’t care enough to make a decision and you’re happy with whoever. Somebody is going to win-why wouldn’t you try to influence that?

If you’re not happy with the current government, I’d be voting for whoever was most likely to deny them seats.

Spoil your paper at least your vote is in the total count. I don’t understand people who are to lazy to vote and claim it a protest.

None of the above.

In GB, these are simply local elections where you're voting for councillors to run your local town or city.

It has no real political effect on national government itself.

Turnouts are usually pretty low for local elections too. That's because they're local and dull.

Vote for your councillors or don't - it's up to you. It doesn't have the degree of responsibility national ones do or elections to devolved administrations, come to that.

This is a local election, not a national one. Vote for the best local candidate to maintain services, schools, bin emptying, libraries, deal with potholes etc. I have two good Tories and one good Labour councillor standing for re-election- the SNP are useless at everything they touch.
Here in Scotland we rank our votes in order of preference, so it’s pretty straightforward.

This.

Women died for the right to vote. Show up, spoil the ballot and be as rude as you want! All spoilt ballots are checked by the candidates and/or their agents so it's a good way to tell them what you really think of them.

Spoilt votes ARE counted but it is rare (though not unheard of) for candidates or political parties to look at those papers, which means your specific message will not 'get heard' as ballot papers might be spoiled for different reasons.
Which is very unfortunate. Because it sucks that people who ARE prepared to vote (when it seems large swathes of yhe population don't have that sense of engagement or care) have such a shitty choice

Always go and spoil your paper. So many people in this country don't bother voting. Imagine if the millions that don't vote spoiled their papers instead and wrote "none of the above" on their ballot slip. The turnout was only 68.8% in the 2017 general election. Imagine if 31.2% of the registered voting population had said "none of the above" by spoiling their ballots? That would have been a bigger popular vote share at 14.6m voters than Theresa Mays winning party (13.6m voters)!!

It would send a much more powerful message than not engaging with the system. If you don't vote what they hear is that you're happy with whatever shitshow you get.

If you don't vote you can be safely ignored.

"Women died for the right to vote."

They didn't die so women are forced to vote. That's as undemocratic as not being able to vote in the first place.

It's pointless spoiling your vote. Either make an informed choice or don't bother.

Don't try to find the perfect candidate or party - they don't exist.

Find and vote for the candidate that best represents your views. You may not agree with them on everything. That's OK.

Vote for local candidates for local issues. That may be a different decision to national policy.

A spoil is better than not turning up. Low turnouts indicate apathy or even bad weather. Spoils are acknowledged and are a symptom of people trying to engage but not satisfied with the candidates on offer. Does it make a significant difference? Not really but patterns of higher than usual spoils are observed.

I'd rather spoil than abstain.

I wouldn’t spoil your vote paper as it creates a huge headache for the clerks doing the vote counting. I think it’s worse than not voting at all.

Are you sure there isn’t a single candidate you could vote for? I’m in a conservative stronghold where it’s realistically pointless to vote against them, but I vote against them every time. There are enough of us doing that now that no conservative voters are a significant minority and I think it’s tempered the conservative council members approaches as they seem less extreme than they used to be on issues.

Neither will make an impact. You will just waste your vote. Nobody will care or notice other than to think a proportion of society is apathetic.

If you want to send a message the only way to do that is by spoiling the ballot. Not voting is taken as apathy.

Elected officials are going to naturally prioritise concerns of people who come to meet them face to face, not paper warriors. If you want to be heard, schedule meeting with your representatives to tell them what you care about, & get high profile in local newspaper for your campaigning on issues.

I've counted votes on polling day...
The votes are shredded later. Counters, table leaders & presiding officers are all too busy to read or contemplate the spoilt ones. Honestly, we're all taking role of being a politically neutral civil servant who isn't supposed to talk about what we read, anyway. If we had influence, we arent supposed to use it. The votes are handled carefully and in public, so a candidate trying to dither over reading spoiled ballots would run risk of looking like interference in the vote count. Even trying to physically access the ballots afterwards... is that really a good use of their time? It's like the USA vote recounts in name of fighting "The great Steal"

The tellers probably read more of the spoilt ones than counters do, and tellers will feed some of what they see back to their local party groups.

The number of spoilts / blanks gets recorded. A record number of spoilt ballots might send a small message that gets attention, but would need to be huge record. Enough for newspapers to report on it. Sure spoil your ballot if that's where your heart lies, but the gesture means more to you than it does to candidates.

Can’t bring myself to vote for any of the shot shows on offer. How do you actually spoil a vote, practically speaking?? Strike through all of them??

Please just vote for the least worst option. A political party doesn't have to - and in fact never will - perfectly align itself to your beliefs. If you want that, feel free to set one up yourself. In reality, you hold your nose and vote for the one you believe will be best for the country/yourself.

If you want to send a message to an official you need to email them or book in to meet with them. Messages on voting slips are rarely read, the count is too fast and busy.

Comments on 'spoiled' ballot papers will not be made public. If you want to express your views, write to your local paper or to each of the candidates.

I spoilt my vote last time. Very Tory area with massive majority so it didnt make a difference. But I did have to go and make my feelings clear in this small way.

I think the main parties are all as bad as each other and aren't worthy of my vote, so I've done a bit of research and chosen the best of the independents. That way it's not a wasted vote as it WILL count in some small way. Simply not turning up or spoiling the paper achieves nothing at all.

Just seen some projections and whilst they show a fall in numbers for Tories and Labour, there's only a one point increase for Libdems, so it seems lots of the "lost" votes of the 2 main parties will be going to independents or smaller parties.

I’d vote Green in your situation. The Green candidate is unlikely to win but it shows the other parties that there is a vote there to be won and that green issues matter to voters - all the parties need to improve in this area.

Local election turnout is so low that if you want to register a protest vote you need to spoil the ballot. In most areas about 60% of those eligible to vote don’t bother to.

I've vote counted many times. All votes are counted to ensure that if there's 200 votes recorded in the paperwork at the polling station, there are 200 votes in the box when we open it.
They're divided into candidates and counted, plus any spoilt votes, making sure we still have 200. Any spoilt votes are read by the counter, believe me! I've had some corkers over the years.
In all the times I've vote counted, I don't think I've ever seen any of the political candidates or their representatives study them in any great depth.