Just read Dave's musings on his polling-day experiences and discovery of the tight regulations surrounding the conduct of polling-station volunteers:
... it makes you wonder how the politicians think of us if they worry we can be that easily swayed.
[Via writerus drivelus]
This reminds me of the story of a guy who turned up at a polling station, very late, quite drunk, demanding to be allowed to vote for Mrs Thatcher. A kind police officer attending the polling station explained to the gentleman that he could certainly vote, if he calmed down. However, the man grew more irate when he discovered Mrs Thatcher wasn't on his ballot paper (not being in Finchley, where Maggie was the MP). The officer attempted to explain to him that he couldn't vote directly for Mrs Thatcher, but could show his support for her by voting for the local Conservative candidate.
Of course, the Labour party member attending the polling station, on hearing a uniformed police officer advising a member of the public inside the polling station to vote for a particular candidate immediately began to raise hell about breaches of the Representation of the People Act. Which all goes to show that while, for most of us, elections are just about expressing an opinion, for those directly involved, they are about winning and losing and the slightest breach of the rules could be the difference between one and the other.
So electoral regulations like this are not about protecting the weak-minded from subliminal propaganda; they are all about protecting the legitimate winner from accusations made by the loser(s) of benefitting from biases built in to the process.
It's been said that democracy isn't about showing support for the winner, but rather demonstrating to the loser that they don't have support, and therefore should shut up and let the government get on with it for a few years. Otherwise, such large groups of politically motivated people have, historically, had a tendency to raise armies and start civil wars.
Not entirely sure I agree, but it does put the whole process of putting a pencil cross in a box into a little perspective, I think...