Today, Thursday 5th December, is Democracy Day! More than 20 campaigns have joined forces in an unprecedented effort to call out the ‘radio silence’ on reforming the voting system. Rarely have so many organisations come together at election time to shine the spotlight on such a crucial issue.
This network of democracy organisations is calling for parties, activists, and the media to use Thursday 5th December as a key date in the electoral calendar to discuss the ‘elephant in the polling booth’ – the need to reform how politics works in Britain.
You can read the open letter signed by 22 organisations, which has been published in the Guardian, here.
In conjunction, many of the campaigns are running parallel activities. Here are some examples of what’s happening today:
At Make Votes Matter, we’re launching our Fair Votes Map, showing candidates’ views on Proportional Representation. The data was crowdsourced by our supporters using the PledgeForPR. If your candidates’ views aren’t shown, why not ask them using this easy tool.
Up to Us are launching their campaign for real democracy with an event this evening in Manchester’s People’s History Museum. This is a collaboration of the Citizens’ Convention on UK Democracy, Compass and many others of us. You can register for places here.
The Electoral Reform Society have done polling that shows 85% of people feel that politics isn’t working, and 80% of people feel they have little or no influence on decision-making today. They are also supporting other events in London and Aberdeen.
Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform is running the Labour4PR pledge, asking Labour candidates to pledge to change the voting system.
Shout Out UK have produced a drill track encouraging young people to vote.
Democracy Club are running WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk and WhereDoIVote.co.uk.
Represent Us are running VoteSmart2019, the tactical voting aggregator.
Extinction Rebellion are running their Future Democracy Hub.
We hope that with this combined effort we can finally say that this general election could be the last under First Past the Post, and we can take the next steps towards real democracy.