‘Go! fly to your polling station!’
I was awkwardly straddled – having unbuckled my seatbelt, like so – across seats 19A and 19B of an ATR-72 when this instruction was called out by the woman who had just vacated the latter in order for me to make a quick get away.
Long since acquainted, we’d been seated together during the flight and went about catching up on a few years’ worth of news, as you do. During our wide-ranging chat, which took in gender discrimination, the dearth of night-life in Kent in the 1980s and her husband’s mellifluous radio voice, I opined that our delayed take off from Gatwick – caused by the plane’s aborted landing on the way in – would jeopardise my opportunity to play elector.
Having gone on an unexpected day-trip on the red-eye, I had left Guernsey before the polls had opened and had booked a return flight which was due to land 25 minutes before they closed again. Despite leaving Gatwick 35 minutes late, I wasn’t able to abandon hope entirely, as I knew that these flights often make up time and we had a force 8 behind us to boot.
So as we touched down on Guernsey’s runway at 7.44pm and the door was opened at 7.45pm and I was two rows from the door at the back, in the seat for which I’d paid an extra £10 just in case this exact scenario arose, I was still facing a potential dash to the nearest polling station.
With the sound of Jo’s directive ringing in my ears, I proceeded across the apron at a speed calculated to avoid getting told off for running and then marched so quickly between the two customs officers in the terminal building, that they laughed. I was able to smile back, and made sure I made eye contact in order to avoid suspicion and thereby escape without a search.
I had parked my ebike outside, figuring that queueing to pay for my parking and then finding somewhere to park at St Martin’s Parish Hall would add up to more than the difference between the duration of the car journey minus the duration of the ebike ride on ‘Turbo’ mode.
I reckon I was pedalling furiously past the Happy Landings before the folk in row 1 had exited the plane.
The traffic lights at Le Chene rudely interrupted my progress, which took me from 7.51pm to 7.52pm. As they changed to amber from green, I had toyed with the idea of mounting the pavement on my right, dismounting briefly to cross Rue des Monts and then leaping back on in the hope of saving a few seconds, but decided that this would be liable to get me in trouble or killed. After due consideration, I shelved the idea and waited.
Forest Road is longer than you think. And trying to persuade an ebike to go faster than 16mph by pushing harder on the pedals is as futile as trying to break up a fight by shouting.
Happily, the lights at Rue des Caches were serenely green and I reached the polling station with 85 seconds to spare.
‘Ah, we’re not the last after all,’ said a woman to her husband as they exited and I entered.
In I went, panting rather loudly in the echoing hall, in which one member of staff was already clearing up after a hard day’s volunteering.
I stated my name and address, was given a large sheet of paper and went over to one of the two booths to place my cross.
It was at this moment, now with seconds to spare – though I knew entering on time was sufficient and that nobody was going to shout ‘put your pens down’ at precisely 8 o’clock – that I realised I never had finally made up my mind about which of my two favoured candidates I was actually going to select.
All that scurrying and haste, and yet I was still undecided.
I can only conclude that my enthusiasm for casting a vote in this most ignored of by-elections, my ‘voter inapathy’ as I think of it, was borne not so much from my determination that a certain person should fulfil the role of 40th States member for the next three years, but out of my desire to participate in democracy – a desire seemingly untarnished by years of my votes having no effect whatsoever. In all my years of voting – beginning with a visit to St Andrew’s Douzaine room to vote in a two-horse race in 1988 – I’ve never voted for anyone who tied or won by one vote. Arguably, none of my votes have ever amounted to anything.
And yet I paid that £10, pedalled like fury and – having finally decided in those last seconds – placed that X, all for a by-election that one of my friends had admitted two days earlier to not having even known about. And she was on the electoral roll.
It must just be that I’ve bought into the Churchillian view that ‘democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’.
But maybe it’s also the fact that I’ve heard a thousand different reasons from people who have chosen not to vote, and I don’t buy any of them. Don’t get me wrong, I entirely respect a choice not to vote. It’s valid. But when people expound on the reasons, they all too often stray into fantasy about how the system works, which absolutely flies in the face of the evidence that someone like me has gathered by sitting through a hundred or more States meetings, edifying or otherwise. I’ve seen plenty of decisions determined by one vote or by a tied vote in that place – decisions that have intergenerational repercussions but which could have gone the other way if just one member had been replaced by someone else.
I’ve witnessed how decisions are reached – though admittedly I’m less clear on how they’re enacted – and I know that who we select to populate that assembly makes a difference.
I’m also not put off by being in the minority. Maybe it’s actually better if the only votes cast are from people who are politically engaged enough to know about the candidates – what they’re offering, whether it makes sense and whether they can be trusted in the first place, based on their track record.
It’s a matter of statistics, after all. It may, in the eyes of the pundits, be ‘a blow to democracy’ or ‘a shot in the arm for critics of island-wide voting’ when only 17% of those on the electoral roll can be bothered to vote, but for me, the couple before me and the 4,756 others who went to the trouble, that only increased our likelihood of making a difference.
And one day it just might.
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