I've got a lot of time for people who say they are going to improvise their own "None Of The Above" box on their ballot paper. It's one thing to not vote because you're lazy; it's quite another to actually go to the ballot box to tell them you're not voting. These people want to send a very clear message to politicians: "I'm not apathetic. I *want* to vote. But you're all corrupt self-serving out-of-touch bastards, and I wouldn't trust you to manage a McDonalds, let alone a constituency."

Sadly though, an improvised "None Of The Above" box isn't actually as much of a statement as we'd like to think. This document explains how spoilt ballot papers are dealt with (PDF, see page 18). It turns out that the official stats don't make any acknowledgement of the precise way in which the ballot paper was spoilt. Instead, it categorises all spoilt papers into five types:

a) No official mark
b) Voting more than once
c) Voter could be identified (You could have a lot of fun incriminating someone with this!)
d) Void or uncertain
e) Rejected in part (I have no idea what this means. Was it half-rejected? Do I get half a vote?)

At the 2005 election, just over 85,000 ballot papers were spoilt. My guess is that they were BNP members who can't read, so they just coloured in all the boxes with crayons, or drew a pretty swastika border around the page. Bless!

How many of those ballots were marked as spoilt because someone added their own "None Of The Above" box? Who knows. It isn't recorded, and so has no effect, other than bother the person counting late into the night who has to deal with the admin of a non-valid paper. No-one knows you've done it. You might as well stay at home - and that's a shame. A spoilt ballot with a message you've written essentially goes unrecorded. It's read by one person, who will be counting hundreds, maybe thousands of ballots. Perhaps it will have made you feel better, it may have felt like a worthwhile protest, but in practice it's just a waste of time.

What we need is a way for voters to show their frustration officially, through the ballot, so that it can be counted up and presented with all the other stats, reported in newspapers for all to see so that no-one can hide from it. How? Make voting mandatory. BUT, also add two extra boxes onto the ballot form: "None Of The Above", and something along the lines of "I Don't Know Enough To Vote".

Imagine what we could do with that information. At the moment, we look at low turn-outs and we say people are "apathetic", a word which means whatever we want it to mean. Lazy? Alienated? Unrepresented? Who can say. If we make people go to the ballot box, but give them the option not to vote as long as they (anonymously) tell us why, then maybe we can start to make some intelligent decisions about what can be done about it. A large "None Of The Above" vote would tell the big parties that they're wildly out of touch with real people. And a large "I Don't Understand Politics" vote would show us that the previous government (and indeed, the media) have failed the country by not equipping us with the knowledge to actually understand how the world works.

I'd be tempted to couple this with a huge government push to educate people politically. When I was in school, I have no memory at all of being taught how the system works, where taxes go, how laws are made, that sort of thing. Proper citizenship lessons should be fundamental; not in teaching you to be a good citizen, but just in terms of teaching how the world works. You can only have a genuine opinion about party policies when you understand how the infrastructure works. The goal should be to keep the "I don't understand politics" vote as small as possible.

In the mean time, fair play to this guy for hacking the election by changing his name to Mr Zero None Of The Above. "I only have one election promise and that is, if I do get elected, I will resign straight away so it really would be a ‘None Of The Above’ Option on this year’s papers." Next election, I'm tempted to contact him to see if we can get one person in every constituency to change their name to None Of The Above, and stand for MP. If the government won't do it, we'll hack the system ourselves.