Vote early, vote often

Many years ago - strange how all my stories start like that - I was at a Conservative Club fundraiser in North Yorkshire. I have no defence, I was just there - no kidnapping, no drugs, nothing. I spent a long few minutes talking to a relatively powerful politician of the time, Baron Brittan of Spennithorne or Leon Brittan as he was called then. I was talking to him about voting and how it was a flawed tool. I argued that voting gives you one chance, every few years, to choose between a couple of, or if you're lucky a few, electable groupings with which you share some opinions. He argued that choosing a band and sticking by them was the mark of a strong democracy. We didn't come to an agreement but he did buy me a drink.

It's the only tool that democracy gives us though, not the drink, the vote. The only other thing that might work is getting out in the street with a banner or a Molotov cocktail depending on your preference.

I got a vote in the referendum about the UK leaving Europe. I was on the losing side. Here in Spain, as a resident and a European Citizen, I have been able to vote in two lots of local municipal elections. Neither Spain nor the UK allows me to vote at a regional level but the UK system allowed me a vote in the last couple of General Elections and in Europe. I'm about to lose that vote for having been absent from Britain for fifteen years. My country is about to leave the European Union anyway so it looked like I was going to lose my Spanish vote too. Disenfranchised everywhere.

Hope springs eternal though. We have elections here in May and, when I heard an advert on the radio, advising EU citizens to get themselves on the voting register, I went to the local Town Hall and checked I was still registered. The people behind the desk thought I was barmy but they rang the central register and confirmed I was on the electoral roll. Whether that would do me any good after March 29 was a moot point. Then, the other day, a rather ambiguous letter from Pinoso Town Hall said that EU citizens should signal their wish to be on the voting list by filling in a form. It had to be done before 30 January. We're still EU citizens at the moment so Maggie and I went to the Town Hall and signed the form yesterday. The same day I read that the UK had signed a bilateral agreement with Spain to maintain the voting rights of Spaniards in the UK and Brits in Spain.

So I'd like to thank Robin Walker and Marco Aguiriano for signing on the dotted line on behalf of their respective governments and so keeping me in the game.

Casting a vote

I've described this process somewhere else, in the past, but as it doesn't happen very often even my most trusty reader may have forgotten - so.

There are two elections going on today. The first is for the majority of the Autonomous Communities, the Regions, which deal with the powers not held by Central Government in areas like health and education. Our region is the Comunitat Valenciana which is made up of three provinces, Valencia, Castellon and Alicante. We are in Alicante and that's where we should vote except that European legislation denies me a vote at this level. I cannot vote regionally either in the UK or in Spain. The second elections are for the local Town Halls. These people decide how much our water and car tax cost, what we pay for rubbish collection, how to organise the local fiestas and lots of the day to day decisions that affect our lives. I do, at least, get to vote at the Town Hall level.

My polling station is in one of the schools in the local town of Pinoso. There is no polling station in the village. There are basic procedural differences between Spain and the UK.

In Britain, provided the system hasn't changed whilst I've been away, you turn up and show that you have the right to vote because you are on the electoral register. That done you are given a ballot paper which you mark with your choice in secret. The marked ballot paper is then placed in the ballot box. You vote for a named person using a first past the post simple majority system.

In Spain you cast your vote by sealing a list of candidates inside an envelope and placing that envelope in the ballot box. The lists are available at the polling station but the lists and envelopes are also available beforehand. This means that lots of people turn up at polling stations with their sealed envelopes already prepared. If you don't have an envelope ready you will need to prepare one in the polling station before you approach your designated electoral table. You prove your identity, I used my passport, someone checks you are on the electoral roll and, provided you are, that's when you are able to place your sealed envelope in the box.

The list system means that you vote for a group of people rather than a single person. The order of the candidates on the lists is chosen by the parties. The number of people elected from each list depends on the number of votes cast and the mathematical formula applied to those votes using a system called the D'Hondt method. It's a proportional representation system based on highest averages. Like all voting systems it has pluses and minuses, supporters and detractors.

Polling stations are open from 9am till 8pm. There are only 5,584 people registered to vote in Pinoso and the vote is local so I presume we will get the local results very quickly. The national picture, reflected in the regional votes, will take longer to firm up just as in the UK.

Scotty, beam me up!

I went to vote. I hunted through the thirty nine piles of candidate lists till I found the one I wanted, pushed it in the envelope, had fun with the spelling of my name at the voting table and that was my part played in the democratic process for another couple of years.

There was though another envelope and another ballot box for the consulta popular - a sort of referendum organised by the local town hall. More fun, more democracy.

The first question was whether we wanted to make Pinoso a Slow City giving priority to bikes and pedestrians and limiting motor vehicles to 30 kph. The second question asked us to prioritise upgrading a road to a local shrine, constructing a walking and running route around the town or building bike lanes between the town centre and the outlying villages.

Fair enough. I wondered why those particular schemes but I thought it was relatively clever to use the election turnout to canvas opinion. Afterwards though I considered what a cumbersome process traditional voting is. It would certinly slow down declaring the Eurovision winner if the system relied on polling stations.

One of the election manifestos I read yesterday, published only on the party's website, said that it cost about two million euros for an election mailshot to every voter in Spain. There must be lots of similar costs with all the palaver of voting slips and their counting not to mention the cost to individuals of travelling to a central location to vote. It can't be long before some much less cumbersome system takes over from the sort of systems that I have experienced all my adult life, can it?

Then of course they'll be able to ask us if we want the road up to Fatima tarmacking at the cost of the cycle ways or the exercise track whenever they want.