In both Hungary and the UK concerns have recently been raised over proposed changes to voter registration methods. Currently in the UK the ‘head of the household’ is responsible for ensuring that everyone in the house who is eligible to vote is registered. It has been proposed that individual rather than household registration should be introduced. Although the ‘head of household’ model does seem rather dated, the proposed reforms have their own problems. The new procedures would seem to make it much easier to opt out from registration, leading to far more unregistered voters, and thus possible shifts to constituency boundaries. The House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee has warned of the potentially damaging impact on democracy of these reforms.
The Contrarian Hungarian reports on a proposed change in the registration process which would require voters to register their intention to vote three months in advance. The Contrarian quotes from an OP on a popular Hungarian blog, Véleményvezér, in which it is argued that such a step would prevent people voting for frivolous, ill thought through reasons. Here’s an extract from that piece:
Besides its numerous advantages, mass democracy is an extraordinarily dangerous invention, as evidenced by the example of the awful leaders, the practicing insane and even of dictators who obtained their power lawfully in democratic elections. Because there is no such thing in reality that the majority of the people would make a rational decision, equipped with thorough knowledge of public life, having considered every single electoral program and assessed many years of political performance.
The Contrarian Hungarian, by contrast, is concerned by the impact such a move would have on democracy in Hungary:
Any intentional design in the electoral law to “filter out” voters of a specific profile is watched closely by civil rights activists, because proof of such intent is not only reproachable but also unconstitutional, on more than one grounds.
In the comments it is suggested that one group many would like to ‘filter out’ is the Roma. Jobbik is apparently trying to make voting dependent upon an elementary school certificate, although, as the Contrarian Hungarian points out, the real danger is probably in less sensational, more subtle, mechanisms which might not seem designed to exclude the Roma but would in practice have such an effect. The Roma, for example, are often less likely to possess various official identification documents.
A different perspective on the Véleményvezér piece is opened up here. This article points out that the Véleményvezér author’s real concern actually seems to be demagoguery – so in fact it’s quite likely he is more anxious to exclude the anti-Roma Jobbik, rather than the Roma themselves. But fiddling round with voting procedures to get the result you want is dodgy whether your target is the left or the far right.
