What a fantastic idea! Truely spectacular! To make this properly effective why not call up the Rebel Clown Army? Activism nowadays has become pale, we need to colour it in, brighten it up and generally turn it on it's head.. Let's have fun! Whoop!

campaign to sticker and graffiti public street litter bins with the simple two word invitation

"VOTE HERE"

get out there in the week running up to the election

I've been wanting to try and get as many people possible to do this so it becomes UK wide.

Politicians of all parties fill their pockets, you couldn’t tell their policies apart without a microscope, the power of the rich, the global corporations and financiers continues merrily whoever is elected; well-meaning do-gooders get elected, then become sucked in or ground down by he weight of the system. While the meaningless circus at Westminster rattles on, our lives are at the mercy of their economic upturns and downturns, grinding away at work just to survive. While the rich and their parliamentary puppets wine and dine, whoever gets in next time will slash the NHS and other services many of us need to get by, to balance the national debt – at our expense, again.

They recall what they see as a historical precedent:

“How things don’t change…In the 18th century, the vast majority of the population were excluded from power by a corrupt political elite, who had the parliamentary processes all sown up in the interests of the rich, ie themselves and their mates (sound familiar?). The poor could see the electoral circus meant nothing to them. In response some set out to take the piss out of the whole charade. In the South London village of Garratt (in modern Wandsworth), from the 1740s to the 1790s, mock elections were held for the fictional office of “Mayor of Garratt”. Huge crowds flocked to a rowdy and fantastic parade and drinking spree, centred on a fake contest, featuring ridiculous candidates making grandiose speeches, promising the mpossible if elected, and swearing oaths filled with sexual innuendo…”

And conclude with practical proposals to “Turn the joke back on them”:

It may not change the world: but why don’t we revive the Garratt tradition, with a vengeance this time, everywhere? We could hold mock elections, in the streets, parks, or even inside the polling stations on election day (till they chuck us out!), at work, school or on the bus, we could stir up a huge non-stop mickey-take of the meaningless parliamentary smokescreen, disrupting, engaging with others, having a laugh, but showing we aren’t taken in? Why not elect your ranty mates, or whoever; maybe they could all turn up at the House of Commons on opening day and claim to be an Honourable Member too? Would your pet gerbil make a good MP?
We could also revive other fun practices from our history: like the Suffragettes’ were fond of following candidates they opposed around and disrupting all their elections speeches; which would be a laugh too, especially with megaphones or sound systems.

These are just two ideas – there’s a million more ways to trash the dash for cash. Let’s use our imaginations, go for it, and not get nicked! Having fun together is more real than parliamentary puppet shows… The more chaos and disorder, the more disruption, the more open rejection of the empty lie of democracy, the more fun we’ll have the more potential for real change.

Clearly anarchist influence is strong amongst some of those associated with Past Tense publications. The full text can in fact already be found on anarchist websites, for instance, here.

Mildly amusing perhaps (though, to tell the truth, the members at our offices who read it thought it pathetic) but theoretically and practically wrong. Mocking politicians is alright to a certain extent (we do it ourselves) but it can give rise to the mistaken idea that is because of corrupt and self-seeking politicians that we suffer from the social problems we do. It’s not. It’s the fault of capitalism. Even if all politicians were saints they still couldn’t make capitalism work in our interest.

Nor is it true that “All elections are a joke”. While what the professional politics who currently dominate politics get up to at Westminister and the antics they engage in to get votes do deserve to be mocked, especially as the media give them so much publicity, there is a serious side to elections.

Elections are ultimately about who controls the government and who gets to make the laws. Ever since most electors have been wage and salary workers the capitalist class has needed to persuade workers into voting for politicians who will support their system. This is what elections are about: tricking workers into voting for pro-capitalist politicians. Past Tense are right to expose this, but wrong to conclude that this means we should never have anything to do with elections. The response should be, as Marx once put it, to transform universal suffrage “from the instrument of fraud that it has been up till now into an instrument of emancipation”. Which is one of the points we are trying to make in contesting this and other elections.

Universal suffrage came into being partly as a result of pressure from below. Past Tense recognise this when they note that “from the 1760s the [Garratt] elections were associated with radical politics: demands for reform of the political system band protests against the economic hardships and lack of liberty for the labouring classes began to appear in the speeches”. But what was “reform of the political system” if not the extension of the suffrage and its use to gain access to political power to try to improve the situation of “the labouring classes”, such as the Chartists later campaigned for? And what did the Suffragettes want if not to extend the suffrage? Was this wrong? We say No, the extension of the vote to workers is a gain and is a crucial difference between today and the situation in 1700s. Certainly, at present the vote is not used wisely — in fact it is used very unwisely — but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be used when once workers have woken up to the fact that capitalism can never be made to work in their interests. To try to speed up this awareness is another reason why we contest elections.

The suggestion to take over “polling stations on election day”, i.e. to try to disrupt the elections, is completely irresponsible but is probably just anarchist bombast. Our advice to them (since the Past Tense people seem a decent lot) is: don’t be stupid, don’t do it. If they really tried it, they’d be in dead trouble and would get nicked, ending up in prison to reflect on the refrain from the Crickets 1959 song “I fought the Law” … “And the Law Won”.

 http://projectsheffield.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/baby-and-bathwater-the-joke-is-crass/

Iraq election voter turnout '62%'

The voter turnout in Iraq's general elections was 62%, officials said, despite attacks that killed 38 people.

Preliminary results are not expected for several days but the turnout figure is down from the 75% who voted in the 2005 general elections.

Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's State of Law Coalition is widely expected to win the most seats.

But it is unlikely one party will form a government alone and there may be months of negotiations on a coalition.

IRAQI GENERAL ELECTION
# Voting to elect 325-member parliament.
# About 19 million eligible voters out of 28 million
# Around 6,200 candidates from 86 factions competing
# 200,000 security personnel on duty in Baghdad
# Key issues: Security, services and disqualification of alleged Baathists
# Previous votes: Jan 2005 (transitional national assembly), Oct 2005 (constitution), Dec 2005 first post-invasion parliament, Feb 2009 (local elections)

Officials from the Independent High Electoral Commission estimated the turnout in Sunday's elections was 62% of the 19 million eligible voters.

The final official results will not be declared until the end of March, though preliminary results are expected in two or three days.

Mr Maliki's State of Law Coalition said it had done well, especially in Baghdad and in the Shia south of Iraq.

Unnamed Iraqi officials told the news agency AFP that he was leading in nine of Iraq's 18 provinces.

Mr Maliki faces competition from the Shia-dominated Iraq National Alliance and the secular coalition of former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.

An official with Mr Allawi's Iraqiya alliance said the bloc was leading in the northern and western provinces.

Election officials gave further breakdowns of the turnout by region.

FROM GLOBAL VOICES
We are just tired from living in horror, we don't want to lose more people we love, this war was bloody and I just want it to end and be a bad memory in my life. I wonder if my relatives abroad will come back... Iraqis want their lives back… I can't wait till the day I'll wake up and open the curtains in my room and see life in my neighborhood again instead of a ghost city, I can't wait till the day that we'll remove the wood we placed over the windows...

I want to hear good news about rebuilding my country... not how many people who were killed. is an 18-year-old Iraqi blogger from the city of Mosul, who voted for the first time

Voter turnout was reported to be 61% in the mainly-Sunni province of Anbar, which sprawls from west of Baghdad to the borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

In the northern Kurdish-controlled autonomous area of Dohuk the turnout was 80%, news agency AFP reported.

There had been fears that Sunnis might stay away, amid feelings of widespread alienation from the political process after a widespread boycott of the 2005 elections.

Some 500 candidates, mostly Sunnis, were banned from running because of their alleged connections to the banned Baath party of former leader Saddam Hussein.

Despite the attacks in Baghdad and other cities including Mosul, Fallujah, Baquba and elsewhere, the election has been hailed as a "milestone" in Iraq's history.

Insurgents had threatened to disrupt the elections, but there were no large-scale suicide bombings as many had feared.

The most deadly strike was on an apartment block in Baghdad which collapsed, killing 25 people.

"Today's voting makes it clear that the future of Iraq belongs to the people of Iraq," Mr Obama said.