Election times

I am always surprised how elections are run in the UK. There is not much of a campaign of any party going on, apart for some leaflets sprouting up a couple of days before the actual election, and then, the most bizarre thing is that the election day is on a Thursday!

That’s an odd thing to me, being an Italian. In my homeland, elections are generally always been on a Sunday and half a day on a Monday. This means Italians have one full day when the vast majority of them are not working and, being the polling stations are not far from where they live, this makes it rather impossible for them not to go to vote. Even when Sunday happens to be a sunny day, and most Italians have spent all day at the sea or in the mountains, they still have time to go to the polling station on Monday morning.

Running the elections on Thursday means that, if you are working (shame on you if you do!) you either go early in the morning or late in the evening. Some people, who commute a long way to go to work, often end up not voting because they are too busy or stuck in traffic. I wonder: does the British government encourage people who do not work to go to vote?

In this year’s European election I could have voted either for the UK or Italian representatives and, although I wanted to vote for the UK ones, I sent my request too late and I ended up in the Italian register.

The election for the British was, as usual, on a Thursday. The Italians residents in the UK instead had a half a day to vote on Friday plus the whole of Saturday. So, the whole nation of Great Britain and Northern Ireland had one working day to go to vote, and the Italian community in this country (minus of course the Italians who have decided to vote for the UK representatives) had one and a half day. I can only guess the Italians had more time to vote because the polling stations were not as many as for the British.

My polling station was in Lewisham Town Hall, and checking the bus planner route from Elephant and Castle, it occurred to me that it would had taken me more than one hour to go there, so I decided to go by bike. I can’t believe I did that, 40 minutes cycling each way, and getting lost uncountable times on the way just to cast my vote!

My wife was waiting for me at home, rather happy to see me finally back in time for dinner. She finds elections rather amusing, being that she has never voted in her entire life. She is from Russia, and she left her homeland when she was nineteen.

She never minds though.

After Peter the Great, Lenin, Stalin and now Putin, democracy for Russians is still an alien word.