Under the Alternative Vote system, voters would get (would have got) the ability to register up to nine voting preferences, which is all very well and good, but I got to the Voting Station this morning and made a disturbing discovery.
I don't even have a first preference.
While certainly I have been an undecided voter in earlier elections, this is the first time that I have looked at the voting form without having given any real thought for which party I would like to support with the mickle might of my vote.
Moreover, this was not just a "Lib Dems or Labour" thing. Even David Cameron - a man who probably used to wear a morning suit to buy his morning newspaper but now makes much show of not being able to put his hands on one for a Royal Wedding - was in with a chance of the Sordellian imprimatur.
Nick Clegg, aka the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, could well have swung it for the Lib Dems. Ediband The Unknown could have taken it for Labour. It was certainly not unthinkable that the Greens would stand secure beneath the impregnable aegis of my cross.
The problem, though, was not a lack of interest, but a genuine lack of what for want of a better word one must call an Alternative. If it's true that the Eskimos have an unusually large number of words for snow (and according to Wikipedia it isn't) then we had better start working on a larger vocabulary for the otherwise indistinguishable shades of political platform upon which we are invited to lavish our electoral enthusiasm.
It's a sad day for something-or-other when one has a more decided preference on what socks to wear than one does for which party should govern, but that seems to be my predicament.
(Admittedly, Sordel is unusually attached to socks, like a recently-liberated house elf.)
Still, it's comforting to think that despite my near-complete aporia, my vote will have been registered with the same vanishing significance as someone who actually cares.
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