Last Wednesday, the Electoral Commission made it a point to urge relatives of patients being treated at Mater Dei Hospital to take the patients’ voting document to the hospital to allow them to vote in the spring hunting referendum and local council elections.

It also made it a point to say that unless relatives comply, police officers would have been tasked with going to the patients’ residences to collect the voting document and take it to the hospital. Whether there was anyone at home to hand over the document is another matter.

Last Saturday, one member of the Electoral Commission said during the press conference, there were six cases in one particular elderly people’s home in which the intervention of the police was required to call at the residence of six elderly people to pick up the document.

As we all know, early voting took place in elderly people’s homes last Saturday and at Mater Dei Hospital on Thursday.

This raised the question – and this journalist asked it – as to whether the time has come for the ID card to be considered as a valid document to be presented at polling stations, enabling the holder to vote. The argument was that situations such as those mentioned above would be avoided, as well as a huge reduction in the cost of producing more than 330,000 voting documents and distributing them one by one.

The answer given was that it was not up to the commission to determine what documents are used at polling stations. The commission simply exercises the law. But, with the way things are developing, there could come a time when voting documents would no longer be required and ID cards used instead.

Whether this will happen in our lifetime, however, remains to be seen. This voting document issue is similar to other matters which are always discussed when election time nears, and yet are never implemented. This includes the possibility of people voting in embassies abroad or even by post, which would avoid taxpayers’ money being used to subsidise Air Malta flights. Or that computers are used in the voting process to avoid the manual counting of the votes.

But, although these changes would make things easier, the impression remains that we are still very far away from arriving at a decision that would drastically alter the process. The level of mistrust between the political parties is still too high to believe that anything could change in the present system. And so, come the next election, the same arguments will be raised without anything being done to change the situation.

Just as much as we continue to retain the day of silence on the eve of an election when the social media is awash with propaganda. But that’s another story.