Most people don’t vote

About 70% of the electorate vote nowadays, it has varied higher or lower but never been as low as 50% of eligible voters to even say “half of eligible people don’t vote” let alone “most”

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8060/CBP-8060.pdf

So assuming you have say 20 old people on your fictional bus, even assuming that all of your voter info is correct and everyone is on the register, the chances of all of them being able to cast a second vote without any of them being caught are billions to one.

The idea that millions of people will risk a significant chance of a lengthy prison sentence for their individually tiny extra votes is absurd when any actual attack on election integrity would not happen at the point of “turning up at the polling station and hoping for the best.”

Even if one in a million voters did try and get away with this - which again is a hugely inflated number from anything we get an indication of - if to do so you stop tens of thousands of people from being able to vote at all that still makes the election less democratic overall.

Why would you need a passport if you aren’t leaving the country?

It’s a piece of paper you buy every ten years if you want to travel across national borders, it’s not like some intrinsic part of your being.

At the point that the new voter ID legislation was introduced, about 8% of the electorate - ~3.5m people - did not have a passport or a driving licence.

This mindset is why a lot of Blairite Labour policy is “be slightly less right wing than the Tories; the policies might suck but as long as everyone left of Thatcher and Farage feels we’re the lesser evil we don’t need to actually try and be good.” Not having anyone representing the left on the national stage is just going to result in more rightwards drift. I’ve commented elsewhere in this thread on not wanting to split the vote too much between dozens of tiny splinter parties, but also voting for Labour in their current state builds complacency about the voters they think they’ve banked because they used to stand for something, and just leads them to chase more of the Tory vote.

The strongest centre left candidates at the moment are the Greens. As far as electoralism goes, it would be better to stand behind a party that actually has a membership than split further into parties which frankly look the same as countless other “like the left flank of Labour but better” parties.

At least something like the Northern Independence Party could raise the priority of the North. I’m not sure what this offers that, say, the Breakthrough Party doesn’t apart from further vote splitting.

Feels like it will offer a similar level of political success and distinction as when you are trying to look up CPB vs CPB-ML vs CPGB-ML vs NCP vs RCPB-ML vs… except with everyone having platitudinal tech marketing guru’s branding like Transform, Change, Breakthrough etc.

Reading & Writing

• !bookclub@lemmy.world

Video Games

• !retrogaming@lemmy.world
• !gamedeals@lemmy.world

Comics

• !comicbooks@lemmy.world

Board Games / Table top games

• !magictcg@lemmy.world

You cannot do that with other social media.

Facebook likes, Twitter likes, Discord reacts, LinkedIn reacts, etc. are all publicly visible. The only possible slight difference with this is that in some cases people might not be aware, in which case the issue would be that it is less obvious to a casual browser than Facebook’s “AncientMariner and 23 others liked this post” rather than that the likes are visible at all.

I’d definitely agree with the people recommending Robert Rankin.

Tom Sharpe is also funny (Wilt, Porterhouse Blue, etc.)

Also (disclaimer that it’s by someone I used to know which may affect my judgement) Go Up by Simon Broadbent is clearly influenced by the Terry Pratchett books set in Ankh Morpork.

I didn’t like it quite as much, and it is more middle grade, but A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking feels kind of Pratchett influenced.