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This from Tracy Mikich, Liberal Democrat candidate for Ryde South East in the 2021 Isle of Wight elections. Ed
Last week, I came last in the Ryde South East Council elections. Securing just 64 votes out of a potential 1,750.
The disturbing reality was only 22 per cent of people living in the ward actually voted. The winner was the Conservative candidate Warren Drew, who lives in Shanklin.
Drew was returned on 112 votes, that’s just 6.4 per cent of the electorate. Is that really a win to celebrate?
Low voter turnout has always been an issue
Recent and popular excuses touted to underpin low voter turnout include being fed up with politics, politicians’ hypocrisy, sleaze and Covid but these are redundant, low voter turnout has always been an issue and most significantly in wards where there’s high social/economic deprivation.
This in turn means vast amounts of people not realising the political influence they have a right to, and the actual power they hold for change. Simply put, the less educated, poorer people who need more representation are not voting.
Within the 20 per cent most deprived areas
If we look at Ryde South East we discover that it is within the 20 per cent most deprived areas in England for multiple deprivation as well as education, skills and training deprivation.
So, who benefits from stifling and suppressing this voice? In the end it’s the privileged, educated and older voters who will always have a vehicle for their agendas as they are more likely to vote.
Get our children out of poverty
This may account for why our elected members are so obsessed with parking, planning permission, roads and obstructing affordable housing developments, instead of prioritising issues to do with access to education, addressing root causes of deprivation, levelling up society, providing economic opportunities for all and importantly getting our 7,000 children out of poverty.
How can this be addressed?
Mandatory voting is one solution or alternatively incentivising people with a reward, such as a lottery entry or tax deduction as well as rolling out new systems of participatory democracy and PR are others.
Maybe the Isle of Wight council should put the Island forward as a test-area to trial ways to increase voter turnout and then we would genuinely have wins worth celebrating.
Image: Glen Carrie under CC BY 2.0
