Sunday, August 22, 2010

The power of the 'one'

Yesterday I worked on the elections on the dec voting table. Filling in forms is one of my favourite things so I had a great time looking up codes and writing them on the special envelopes. It was a fun day hanging with my mum and meeting ALL sorts of people.

After 11 hours of this & some hot (salt-less) chips, round two started. The counting.

It was amazing to watch the individual papers add up in their piles of ridiculously long white papers. Each one represented someone's nomination for who they would like to lead and direct our country.

It seriously made me so sad to see the number of informal papers grow (probably a sign that I am getting super old). 7% of votes cast by the people who voted at our booth didn't even count, either because they purposely wasted their vote or didn't follow the instructions (it can be difficult to put a '1' in a box sometimes)! If 'Informal votes' was a party they would've come in a close 4th in our local booth - just 3% behind the greens.

According to today's figures (are you getting that I like statistics a bit?) 618,435 people cast informal votes yesterday, which is roughly 5% of our voting population - in some electorates almost 15% wasted their vote. http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/election2010/7949200/informal-voting-hits-record-high
Hmmm...

Why is this bothering me so much this year? I have never really cared before whether people voted or who they voted for. But it has hit me this year how awesome it is that in Australia we get to vote for our political leaders and that if we'd lived 109 years ago us women would have been fighting for our right to elect our leaders. Voting is a great privilege that not everyone around the world is privy to!

The second thing that hit me was how quickly the 'ones' became many as we sorted them into their piles. I think sometimes people think 'what's the point, my 1 vote won't count.' As I was thinking about this last night, I thought about a storm - storm is made up of millions of 'one raindrop's without the 'ones' there would not be a storm. Likewise a choir is made up of many 'one voice's, an army of many 'one soldier's, a herd of many 'one cows', a beach of countless tiny, insignificant 'one grains'. It's so easy to see the enormity, but forgetting it is just made up of many 'ones'.

I think sometimes this mindset can also affect the way we react to people and to problems (I know it does for me). We see the hugeness and the impossibility of changing world hunger, or poverty, or kids on drugs, or environmental issues or whatever and give up. We do nothing. We waste our opportunity. We forget about the power of the 'one'.

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