Un-United Kingdom

[Aractus]

Scotland has a population of about 5.5 million, out of those about 3.6 million voted in the referendum. Which means, if my maybe is correct, about 29℅ of the population voted no. The rest either voted yes, didn't vote or were ineligible to vote.

Yes, and you nearly highlighted the problem with optional voting.

The number you've been hearing reported is that there was an 84% turnout of registered voters, and this is true - but only from a certain point of view. The truth is that the pro-unionist councils had a much higher voter turnout than the pro-independence ones (). For instance, Glasglow - the council with the highest percentage of yes votes had a voter turnout of only 75% which was the lowest in the election!

This highlights exactly the nature of the problem of optional voting, the pro-Yes working class councils had a low voter turnout which is exactly what you expect in a mock-democracy where voting is optional. There is only one way to have an equitable election and that is to have equal representation of all community demographics, which is just not possible with optional voting.

Let's compare that with our last federal election here in Australia. The true turnout figure was 87% - however the official number is 93.3%. The latter is the number of people who were required to vote and on the electoral roll - much like the 84% figure given for the Scot's last election. However taking into account people who were required or eligible to vote and who were not enrolled we get 87% - which we consider to be a low turnout. We also had an all-time high of informal votes - 5.9% to be exact. If you deduct that then we had 81%. I, however, don't believe in deducting that number because once you make voting mandatory you are giving people the opportunity to participate by casting an informal vote if they wish - in other words those 5.9% (for the most part) deliberately chose not to make a choice on their ballot, but they still cast it. So we had an actual turnout in 2013 of 87% which we consider quite low.

97% of the Scottish electorate were eligible to vote, so in total they had an actual turnout of 82% - and they consider this to be a high voter turnout!