Back at the desk

I wrote all this yesterday (Tuesday), and then left it at work - Doh!

It's always tough to come back to work after a three-day weekend isn't it. I find the best way to ease oneself back into paid employment is to use the first morning back at one's desk to update one's journal. It probably doesn't work well for those people who make a living as a tyre and exhaust fitter, but for a technical writer, it looks precisely the same as writing a user manual for a washing machine.

I got loads done over the weekend. The dragon wrote a list of things we needed to accomplish and stuck it to the fridge door last week. Incidentally, I've noticed that Americans don't say "ice box" any more. Why's that? Go back a few years and all American films and tv shows had "ice boxes" in them. Now they all seem to have refrigerators. Seriously, I'm interested, why is that? But I digress.

This weekend I cut back the elephant grass in the back garden, we planted strawberries, did some weeding, went grocery shopping, went to Ikea for a book storage solution for Dumpy, went to the Chinese supermarket, spray painted Dumpy's tricycle, made a totally awesome toad-in-the-hole...



and found enough time to go to Bowood House and gardens yesterday and play...



On the down side, I didn't get around to shampooing the carpet, but I am intending to do that this evening.

I want to mention spoiling ballot papers. Someone left a note on my last entry about spoilt papers and I need to make a comment I think. To recap, I said that I can't understand why, when I go to vote, they record the unique number of the ballot paper I use, against my name and address on the electoral role listing. The problem of course being that it is possible to trace my ballot paper back to me. My noter suggested that the measure is in place to prevent Returning Officers adding ballot papers illegally.

Well, if that is the reason for this measure, then I have two comments to make. First, it won't work. Even with this system in place, a returning officer could easily put aside a few hundred ballot papers as the day progressed, and then at the end of the day, record them next to people who didn't bother voting. Typically Only about 40% of people vote in a local election, 70% in a general election. Secondly, if you need to make a list of valid ballot papers, I don't care, go ahead and do it, but tell me why you need to link them with a voter. Why can't you just make a list of valid ballot papers and put a cross next to the name of each person who came to vote? As long as the list of valid papers is the same length as the list of people who voted, there's no problem is there?

The only theoretical advantage of the current system I can see, is that in the event of an unusually high number of spoilt papers, the voter associated with each spoilt paper can be contacted and asked if they spoilt their own paper. This would in theory prevent a Returning Officer from deliberately spoiling papers. In practice that won't work either of course, because when asked the question, "did you spoil your ballot paper?" people who accidentally spoilt their paper will say, "no". In fact, there's a good chance that people who spoilt their paper deliberately will say, "no". And of course, people who genuinely didn't spoil their ballot paper will say, "no". A much better solution would be to declare any election void if the number of spoilt papers changes the result.