When I was directly involved in direct democracy

June 15, 2021, 4 Comments

I vote every time I can, always have and always will. In Switzerland that means voting fairly frequently but this time I got involved in the counting of the votes too. Well, not actual counting (as you’ll see) but I became a cog on the electoral machine that keeps Swiss democracy running so smoothly. And it has to run smoothly, with a referendum every few months.

I wanted to see how it works after the votes have been cast, so I spent a day as part of the team that makes it all happen. Any Swiss voter could be called up to do this (a bit like jury service) or you can volunteer. I was the only volunteer in my team of 20 counting votes in one electoral district of Bern. We sat at socially-distanced tables in a local gym with no music or chatter. Very serious stuff. It reminded me of school exams.

Around 90% of votes are cast by post (it’s normal in Switzerland) so we each had a giant stack of envelopes. They’d already been slit open by a machine and we had to fish out the contents: the offical voting certificate and a second envelope containing the voting slips. The two are separate so that no one sees how a particular person voted. Then came the good part: a reality check on the certificate. I got distracted once I noticed that the voter’s year of birth was on there. My youngest voter was from 2002, my oldest from 1933. Most important was the signature: no signature = no vote, and it’s amazing how people forgot that.

Over 600 envelopes later, I moved on to stage two: extracting the voting slips from the second envelope (more on the voting system here). We were lucky to have only two slips, one for the national referendums and one for a Bern election, so sorting was easy. Easy but mind-numbingly dull. It helped that the voting envelopes had four holes in them so you could quickly see if you missed one slip inside. Piles of sorted slips were whisked away to be stamped with a little Swiss cross, but piles more envelopes kept appearing. We were done by lunchtime.

Votes in Bern are usually scanned and counted by machine. These postal votes would be done that evening, so that on election day itself (always a Sunday), the only votes that needed to be counted would be the ones handed in before the noon deadline. But for that to work, the postal votes must be ready to be scanned. That was our next job: checking each voting slip. Each of the national referendum questions had Yes and No boxes that voters crossed in blue or black ink. Anything that wouldn’t scan, we took out for a manual count – both Yes and No crossed, mistakes Tippexed out, any writing at all, red ink, green ink and yes, also pencil. Or even voting by drawing a smiley face instead of a cross.

The final hurdle was sorting the green slips for the local election. Each had a hand-written name on it and could not be scanned so our sorting was to speed up the count. Three candidates, three piles of votes. Simple, apart from the ones with other names written in or totally illegible handwriting or completely blank. Sorted piles were swapped around for a second check, then bundled up ready to be counted. And that was it.

A whole Saturday spent opening envelopes and sorting votes but bizarrely I enjoyed it. Seeing democracy at work, being involved, taking part in something that we could easily take for granted. It reinforced my view that everyone should vote as not everyone in the world can. My one regret? I should have brought plasters for my index fingers. Sliding them into envelopes with razor-cut edges wasn’t good for them at all.

For the results I had to wait until Sunday evening like everyone else. Five national referendums became No, No, Yes, No, Yes with the only real surprise being the rejection of the new CO2 law. Voters overturning legislation: that’s direct democracy in action, and I had been part of it.