A radical way to get more people voting

For a start everybody was already registered on the National Register and the electoral roll was based on that list.

All you needed to do was get your identity card stamped at the parish polling station and away you went.

If you were too sick or disabled to get to the station you could get word to the person in charge who you wanted to vote for and they would pop your ballot paper in for you.

Given the war had only ended a few years earlier it is perhaps not surprising that voters had to be resident only from 1 January to vote that December.

However, in the intervening years it seems to have got harder to vote.

For a start, you now have to be resident for at least two years before applying.

Rather than an entitlement, the ability to vote has, over the decades, become a privilege.

Perhaps as a result, the island has a woeful voting record where only 30,000 people join the electoral roll. Tens of thousands of potential voters are lost before voting day.

That gets worse when, despite registering, people do not bother to actually make their cross.

In total, only four out of 10 islanders who could vote actually do so.

The States Assembly and Constitutional Committee recognises that and is looking to strip away some of the barriers.

Proposals to be debated next week allow people without a permanent home to vote, give anonymity to people who fear for their safety if their address is on the roll and relax the rules on postal voting.

Combine that with advance polling stations and there should be some improvement in voting numbers.

However, an amendment placed last week offers hope of something more radical for 2024. Instead of spending more than £100,000 every few years compiling an electoral roll, why not make it part of the e-census? Find out who is eligible then automatically add them to the voting list.

Not only could it save a lot of money but by making the right to vote ‘opt out’ rather than ‘opt in’ thousands more islanders can vote on the day – should they wish.