If you don’t vote, you are one of the 40% who don’t. The majority of these people don’t vote because they “can’t be bothered”, “don’t ‘do’ politics”, “it’s raining” or some other banal uneducated ill informed reason.

You MAY be a well educated, well informed, politically aware type who is choosing not to vote for the sorts of reason Mr. Brand cites for not voting but it is pointless, you are just lost in the mass of other non-voters.

Politicians don’t see your protest, don’t hear it, they just put it down as ‘a low turnout this year’.

If you want your protest to be heard, I mean really heard, you have to spoil your ballot. The “pile of papers that contain the indecipherable scribblings of those who didn’t fill the form in properly” is considerably smaller than the number of ‘can’t be bothereds’ and it IS counted.

Look at it like this…

If I took the time to put on a coat, turn off the TV, walk to the polling booth, write “None of the Above” (or something equally pithy) onto my polling card, put it in the box, and go home to wait for the result. No one is in any doubt that I CAN be bothered, that I am NOT lazy or unpolitical. They know absolutely that I DO care, but that I didn’t want to vote for anyone.

If 1% of the ballot gets spoiled, nothing happens, if 40% of the ballot gets spoiled, it gets noticed, talked about, analysed, questions get asked, “Things” happen. Politicians can no longer brush it off as if most non-voters just don’t care.

To effect change you have to DO something, sitting at home, doing nothing, clicking likes, signing petitions, not voting is not going to achieve anything. It’s just bread and circuses, an anesthetic and cheap way to let unhappy people express their ire without causing any trouble.

As Newton said; “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. If you put zero effort into changing the system, there will be zero change in the system.