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If you spoil your ballot paper or return a blank ballot paper (which strikes me as being a bit risky given that Brown seems to be morphing into Mugabe) I understand that this is counted and the proportion of the vote attributed to each party is reduced accordingly. It's a kind of vote for non of the above. It won't stop the above from becoming elected, but registers your disapproval rather than registering approval for one party as a means of ensuring another doesn't get in.
If there were 12,000 votes for Red, 9,000 for Blue, 6,000 for Yellow and 3,000 for Green but 70,000 people returned spoilt or blank ballot papers instead of staying at home, then instead of seeing percentages of 40, 30, 20 and 10 (which make the dominant parties seem reasonably well supported), we'd see figures of 3, 6, 9, and 12%.
Shouldn't those figures be reported anyway? Even the 35% that the winners seem to get seems pretty poor to me, but if the turnout's only two-thirds of the people who could have voted, we should be reporting the figure of 23% ish shouldn't we?
Imagine the turnout is really low - say less than 40% - but the Blue party romps home with 60% of the votes cast. Should we really have to listen to them bleating on about how brilliant a result that is, or should we be reminded that 60% of 40% means that that party would have got less than a quarter of the potential vote? That's the figure I'm interested in.