There is the beginnings of an interesting thread on the iDC (Distributed Creativity) List about “voting as an act of citizenship, perhaps?” Prof. Vanalyne Green of the University of Leeds is initiating a project that “wants to validate people for not voting, when they don’t vote, rather than shame them.” She writes:

Working as an artist, writer and someone passionate about education and educational programs, I’ve begun a collaboration about the relationship between politics and pleasure as it might be understood through voting.

. . .

Anyway: it all started when Stephen was telling me that people who voted Tory had different visual memories of what they saw on the way to their polling station, as compared with people who voted Labour. And so we began talking about our ludicrous moments of hope and utopia while in the voting station and how, in spite of our cynicism, we so enjoyed those moments of mingling with strangers united by our common desire for a better world in an instant when we probably all knew that the vote is nigh on to meaning nothing. (Or does it. The experience of having the elections rigged in the States, the Supreme Court, Gore, Ohio, etc., makes for a different set of traumas, I think… .). Stephen is doing a lot of work about reality television shows that incorporate voting. Why is it, he asks, people will vote for Big Brother, the controversial reality TV show in Britain, but they won’t vote in the general election? Voting is ever more part of a social

Full post via iDC.

The Road to Voting Project website.