Over half the world’s population, over four billion people will go to the polls in 2024, in elections being held in over forty countries. The United Kingdom and the United States will both have huge elections; the US is putting incumbent Joe Biden up against former president Donald Trump, as no one else seems to be a viable opponent for him. Historically, the incumbent gets a second term; we will see whether that plays out or not.
The United Kingdom must have an election before the end of January 2025 but the Conservatives are dragging their feet on calling it because their polling popularity is so low. They face an almost certain total wipeout, which will end nearly a decade and a half of Tory rule that has seen a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, austerity measures that have killed thousands, the Brexit fiasco, another coalition with the Democratic Unionist Party, the scandals of Johnsonism and Partygate during the Covid-19 pandemic, and no fewer than five – count them! – Prime Ministers in that time.
There has already been an election in Russia, but it was a dummy one in which the incumbent Putin managed to garner himself nearly 90% of the vote. This will likely also be the case in Rwanda and Belarus.
But we in the UK and the US shouldn’t consider ourselves the bastions of democracy. After all, if Biden does win, will Trump concede the defeat? He refused to in 2020 and the attack on the Capitol building on 6 January 2021, in which two people died, was the result. There are still Trump supporters who think the election was ‘stolen’ from him. Who’s to say what will happen next time?
Meanwhile, in England and Wales, the Tory government brought in rules last year that means that anyone voting in person in many elections must present photographic ID. The acceptable forms of this include the Oyster card (used for travelling around London) for over 60s but not, crucially, Oyster cards for those younger than that. People without photographic ID often include marginalised people including young people, people of colour, immigrants and others in precarious positions in society.
❌A whopping 5 million Brits could lose their vote on polling day due to a lack of awareness over new #voterID rules, including more than 1 in 4 young people. pic.twitter.com/X0kDWf0Za6
— Best for Britain (@BestForBritain) April 11, 2024
These people are more likely to vote for Labour or other parties on the left, so it’s easy to assume this is why the Tories would like to disenfranchise them.
Voter fraud has been such a non issue in the UK that it makes no sense as to why this was a priority for the government.
Voter suppression in the United States shows a similar story to the UK – in Texas, the counties with the biggest increase in Latino and African-American habitants have seen the most closures of polling sites. On average they had seen 542 close between 2012 and 2018, but counties with the lowest increase of minority populations had only seen 34 polling sites close. This makes it hard for people to exercise their right to vote.
It would be easy to be pessimistic because of the above and other stories in other countries like it. And for sure, there needs to be universal suffrage and the right to access free and democratic voting for all of age citizens of the world.
There’s much to be done in this arena. And yet, if you look back just over a hundred years, we’ve come a long way.
In the United Kingdom, women aged over thirty and who were a member of or married to a member of the electoral roll were given the vote in 1918. This enabled approximately 8.4 million women to vote. Ten years later, this was extended to the same rights as men – all those over the age of twenty-one and without any property requirements.
Arthur Delaney (1927-1987)
March of the Suffragettes pic.twitter.com/wdXxDnd23B— Olga Tuleninova 🦋 (@olgatuleninova) April 13, 2024
Women in the United States were given the vote in an amendment to the constitution just a little bit over a hundred years ago.
When the Republic of Ireland was formed in 1922, the government gave equal voting rights to both men and women, ahead of those given in the UK.
In the United States, felons could not vote upon completing of their sentence until 2018; now, only two states still have this law.
Indigenous women in Australia did not get the vote until 1960, six decades after white women, and there were similar barriers to Indigenous or immigrant women in the United States and Canada.
Yet women have turned out to vote in higher numbers than men in US presidential elections in every election since 1894! That is an amazing statistic.
I truly believe that voting is a privilege and that you should vote as part of living in a civilized society. Whilever there are people in the world – like in Afghanistan, where women had the right to vote in 1919, but lost the right under the Taliban, had the right returned in 2001 after the fall of the Taliban, only to lose the right once again in 2021 when the Taliban retook power – who do not have the right to vote, I believe we should use our right each time. Enough people have fought and died for it.
It is easy to feel disheartened by the state of politics in much of the West, but voting is a simple way to try to effect change.
Image: RachelH_