Many (including me) have local elections today. You should always vote because this is your best chance of a representative you agree with. Here’s why.
@dominictristram Local Elections - Vote Today
♬ original sound Dom Tristram
Generated transcript:
So if like me, you have local elections today, then this is the day to go out and vote unless you’ve already used your postal vote. A lot of people think there’s not much point voting. What can a local council do? But actually a local council can do a lot of things, budgets for education and social care, .
They can obviously do things to reduce pollution and reduce, , traffic or pedestrianize areas, all sorts of things that improve your quality of life. It’s worth voting in local elections because this is really the main opportunity. You have to choose a representative who you believe in. Local elections generally have low turnouts, which means that if you are fairly determined, you and some like-minded friends can get a councillor who you agree with.
So you’ll get a lot of stuff from the big parties at general Elections saying only vote for the big parties. What’s the point of voting for a small one? Well, they can’t use that excuse at local elections. I’ll give you an example. I’ve just come back from my polling station it was about 1:00 PM.
And so far today, in the whole day, they’ve had 53 votes. So if you and some like-minded friends, and it doesn’t have to be many, if you decide you’re all gonna vote, you can basically swing that whole result. Now, of course, that number will go up by the end of the day, but not by much. And you’re talking about people winning council seats on four or 500 votes sometimes.
And where I live in Bath and Northeast Somerset we, T he Green Party, have lost out on council seats by as few as seven or eight votes on a few occasions. It’s always worth voting because your vote and the vote to your friends or family can just swing the whole result.
Don’t believe people who tell you the greens can’t win . Don’t believe people who tell you your vote won’t make a difference. Because actually with such small margins, you can go from a ward where a party hasn’t even stood before to that party winning, and that does happen.
You can get these surprise results and it’s because a lot of the time the big parties don’t even bother campaigning in what they consider safe ward. So go and vote. Maybe you’ll cause some surprises. A green councillor will always work in your best interests. So if you really want social and environmental justice, the Green Party isn’t the sort of party where people join because they know they’ll get elected and they can sit there comfortably doing, nothing.
They join because they really want to help, really want to help their communities. So you’ve got a choice today. You can go make an active choice to elect people who really want to help out, really want to make your world better, or you can make a choice for more of the same.
And believe me, not voting is the vote for more of the same. Please don’t do it. Please use your vote.