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Originally Posted by towny
Not voting is as much a democratic act as voting for the party of your choice. By not voting, people exercise their right not to influence the political process, and/or to leave the choosing of their political representatives to someone else.
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Or, IMO, rather that they consider they're all as bad as each other, so it doesn't make a damn bit of difference.
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if you are implying that the results are, as a consequence of this, meaningless (as less than 50% of electors voted), then I think you are wrong. Those who were entitled to vote but did not, left the choice to those that did. Therefore the result, regardless of turnout, is legitimised by the choice of the entire electorate.
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More to the point, had the UK European Election results mirrored the UK Local Election results, I think it would have been meaningless because people would have just been blindly voting for a party.
However the fact that there were *substantial* differences suggests that many of those who voted were actually doing so on the basis of issues and principles, rather than simple "party alliegence".