"Reasons to vote blank as a repudiation of corrupt politicians and that their tsunami echo is heard around the globe. From some sources I reviewed on the Internet, I pass these two excerpts that I found as more ...
"Reasons to vote blank as a repudiation of corrupt politicians and that their tsunami echo is heard around the globe. From some sources I reviewed on the Internet, I pass these two excerpts that I found as more explicit.
First Reason:
The greatest evil that plagues us is not that one party or another governs, but that the system is degraded, that democracy is hijacked by a political caste that has abandoned authentic democracy and has embraced a kind of corrupt democratic dictatorship, which the Greeks already baptized as oligarchy. The blank vote goes directly against the waterline of that degraded democracy, without renouncing true democracy, but vindicating it.
While we vote for the opposition to punish the government that has done wrong, we continue to feed the system, without improving it one iota. When we vote, we benefit all the parties that live off the system and have degraded it. The party that wins gets the government as a prize, but the others go to the opposition, where there are also benefits and privileges: public money for the party, salaries paid by citizens, official cars and participation, as a quota, in institutions and public companies or dominated by political power.
The blank vote means a criticism of bad government, of the hijackers and depravers of democracy, without renouncing a regenerated democracy that we believe is the best antidote against totalitarianism.
If we believe that the democratic system is degraded and prostituted by political parties and professional politicians, if we believe that the world, which remains unjust and violent, is a victim of bad government and needs to improve, the blank vote is the best option because that vote represents a clear message to the system: "we are democrats and we want democracy, but not yours, the one you have degraded and corrupted, but an authentic, clean democracy, in which the citizen controls the powers and participates in the decision-making processes".
If we are convinced that the citizen is the sovereign in democracy, a system that is defined as "the government of the people, by the people and for the people", voting blank is to reject politicians and tell them that they have corrupted the system, abandoning citizens, without paying attention to their aspirations. Without earning the trust of voters every day, they practice a policy based on a false democracy to exercise an unwanted dominance, enjoy unfair privileges and misgovern a nation that they fail to improve.
We could provide many more reasons and we will continue to do so in other
posts, but it is important to end these arguments by stating that politicians, who are fully aware that the only vote that hurts them and endangers their careful system of privileges and
dominion, is the blank vote, which they have devalued, and that is why
arbitrarily they have stripped it of representation.
In good law, in justice and in democracy, the blank vote should
obtain, like any other, a representation in Parliament. If citizens want empty seats to exist, on what basis are they contradicted?
Blank votes must be represented in parliaments with empty seats; those empty seats in the legislative chambers would be a testimony of claim as citizen rejection of bad government, corruption, inefficiency, abuse of power and
unjustified privileges.
Second Reason:
Indeed, the blank vote does go to the most voted in the case of Spain (but not directly), but I would add a nuance: it favors all parties that have exceeded the exclusion index (minimum percentage of votes on the total valid votes that must be obtained to enter the distribution of seats) and, especially, the most voted.
This is due to that exclusion index, since having more valid votes the minimum number of votes to get a seat goes up, and the seats that could have been obtained by minority parties that did not exceed the index are distributed among those who do exceed it, according to a system known as D'Hondt Law.
In Spain, the exclusion index in the Municipal Elections is 5 percent and in the General Elections, it is 3 percent. If this index were not applied, blank votes would not influence the distribution of seats, in fact they influence more the higher the index (that is, they harm the minorities and favor the majorities).
What I mean is that mathematically it influences the result, but it is also true that many blank votes would be needed in a small constituency to see the effect.
I am going to put a more complex example than the one above:
- Party 1 ---> 400 votes
- Party 2 ---> 300 votes
- Party 3 ---> 150 votes
- Party 4 ---> 100 votes
- Party 5 ---> 50 votes
100 seats are distributed among five parties and there is an exclusion index of 3 percent.
First case: (0-666 blank votes)
Total valid votes: 1000-1666 votes
The seats would come out like this:
- Party 1 ---> 40 seats
- Party 2 ---> 30 seats
- Party 3 ---> 15 seats
- Party 4 ---> 10 seats
- Party 5 ---> 5 seats
Second case: 667 - 2333 blank votes)
Total valid votes: 1667 - 3333 votes
- Party 1 ---> 42 seats
- Party 2 ---> 32 seats
- Party 3 ---> 16 seats
- Party 4 ---> 10 seats
- Party 5 ---> Does not enter the distribution of seats because the percentage of votes is less than 3 percent.
Here we observe that the 5 seats that party 5 would have obtained with a number of blank votes less than 667, are distributed among the remaining parties. From 2,333 blank votes, party 4 would also disappear from the calculation, with the consequent distribution of its 10 seats among the remaining 3.
100 seats are distributed among five parties and there is an exclusion index of 5 percent:
First case (0 blank votes):
Total valid votes: 1000 votes
The seats would come out like this:
- Party 1 ---> 40 seats
- Party 2 ---> 30 seats
- Party 3 ---> 15 seats
- Party 4 ---> 10 seats
- Party 5 ---> 5 seats
Second case: (1 - 1000 blank votes)
Total valid votes: 1001 - 2000 votes
- Party 1 ---> 42 seats
- Party 2 ---> 32 seats
- Party 3 ---> 16 seats
- Party 4 ---> 10 seats
- Party 5 ---> Does not enter the distribution of seats because the percentage of
votes is less than 5 percent.
Here we observe that a single blank vote with the exclusion index of 5 percent achieves the same effect as 667 with an exclusion index of 3 percent (only in this example, this does not mean that they always keep that proportion), which shows that blank votes have more influence the higher the exclusion index.
P.S. You can vote blank without a ballot, you just have to introduce a piece of white paper in its place. Out of repudiation towards corrupt politicians in the next regional elections, Lanzarote will vote blank".
