A bee in my bonnet.

I have a bee in my bonnet. When we learnt that elections at home had finally been announced we, as responsible British citizens, started to look into getting our overseas vote sorted. Sounds easy enough.

We need to down load a certain form, fill it out and post it off. We will then receive our postal vote form which we can then return. Like I said, it all sounds simple enough until you begin to factor in the amount of time post takes between this little island and the slightly larger one we call home. The minimum time this process is likely to take is three weeks assuming that all received post is acted on and responded to immediately.

Having been away earlier in the month, just after the announcement of the elections, my task for the day was to get to grips with the process and get our forms in the post the same day. Sadly, due to the need for our signature to be on the forms it is not possible to e-mail the forms which would speed the whole process up hugely.

First problem, we have no printer here. I was about to e-mail our team leader, who does have a printer, but he is on holiday with his family. Thankfully our American team mates have a printer and happily printed out the form and we went round to collect it and head down to the posta (post office) to get them straight in the mail.

Second problem, the voter registration form requires a witness to confirm that we are who we say we are. We can't vouch for each other, but the witness must be a British citizen which leads us to the third problem. We don't know any other British citizens here. Lots of German's, italians, some Americans and Tanzanian's but no British. So what next?

Perhaps, if we were being really responsible, we should have organised this months ago or as soon as we left the UK. To be honest we thought that someone from an embassy or something would contact us as we had to inform them where we were and we were used to being tracked down when at home in the UK. But now we are running out of time and although I suspect we have done more already than most in the UK with respect to our vote, it is looking like we won't get to participate in next months general election.

Rich tells me I have a bee in my bonnet about this, but it does feel like the sort of thing we come across in our current place of residence rather than the sort of thing we expect from the democratic process in our home country! I have not given up however and will persevere!