Today, Germans (and, among others, Belgians) voted in the 2009 European Parliament election. Far, far too few people, I say. Turnout in my electoral district was 41.8% — and that’s considered high in comparison to estimates for other districts. Ouch.
In addition to the obvious, well-known disenchantment with politics, I blame a lack of understanding how European politics affect its member states — many didn’t have the necessary education to understand the (somewhat nascent system), and on top of that, you hardly ever see the effects directly. As one voter put it succinctly: EU politics are quite abstract.
I helped with this election, as I did with the one in 2004. When you vote, they hand you a list to sign up as a helper; very few people (in my district, anyhow) ever do, but back in 2002-ish, I once did. There’s little I do in the way of voluntary work for the community, so it seemed right.
There’s two parts to this job. Voting took place between 8 AM and 6 PM, so we split up into two five-hour shifts. Every voter passes by you before they get to go to the booth; they either hand in their notification letter (which you get from your municipality a few weeks earlier), or an ID. One helper ticks them off in the list of eligle voters; one (me, as far as today is concerned) simple counts voters; one hands them the slip with checkboxes. There’s supposed to be four people, but so few people volunteered that we only had three in the second shift, though with the low turnout, we really could have done it with two. (I do realize this is a means of mutual verification.
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And then, at six, you shut the doors (symbolizing that voting is no longer allowed), then reopen them because counting is public (though, typically, nobody ever does show up). Next, you empty the ballot box, count all slips, compare them to the amount of ticked off eligible voters, and compare again to the amount of counted votes. Then, you start to count by party, sum that up, and compare again. Finally, you make each one package for the major parties, and another for all minor parties combined.
There’s candy, coffee, and of course a huge amount of smalltalk — especially when as few people as today show up. At times, nobody came in for twenty minutes.
I am disillusioned, if not frightened, by the politics of the major parties when it comes to protection of privacy, the long overdue modernization of copyright and patent law, and other matters. And lo and behold: not only is there a party focusing on exactly these matters; it also happens to have an amusing name and is largely staffed by people from my very industry, IT. So, this time, I decided to make a voting choice that’s statistically unlikely to make much of a dent, but perhaps just enough to at least express, nay, shout out, the existence of serious issues.
And hey, in Sweden, their country of origin, they’re already the third largest party by membership count. I’m not kidding. This isn’t a fringe group, nor is the name intended to suggest a lack of interest in serious solutions. If anything, it is one of the few parties interested in revolutionizing the way we think of protecting that which we create. It’s a huge challenge, but it is one that, when major parties have addressed it at all, they did so by listening to the lobbies of the content industries, rather than to individual creators.
As developers of software, composers and performers of music, designers of graphics, websites and typefaces, actors and more, we owe it to ourselves to find something that’s actually compatible with the new ways of obtaining and distributing media, free from the shackles of tradition and commercial greed.