It seems nothing short of extraordinary that in this country, we have the right to not vote, but not the right to not let the political parties know about it!

Can it really be true that the Electoral Commission, no less, actually sends a list of those who do not vote to our political parties? I always thought the parties knew by ticking off names as the public troops in (something they should not be allowed to do either), and then making their own list of who did or did not turn up on voting day.

But the revelation, as explained by Harry Vassallo of Alternattiva Demokratika fame, that such lists are actually compiled and sent to the political parties by the Electoral Commission is nothing short of astounding and disgraceful, if this is the case.

Is this common practise in the more civilised of our fellow European Union members too? Not in the Eastern European countries, where voting rights are in one sense recent, but in France, in Germany and in Italy and the UK? Do the political parties in these more advanced democracies than ours, also receive lists of who did not vote, or even ask for such confidential information?

Of course, in these countries voter participation is relatively low compared to ours, so pressure cannot be brought to bear on individuals as it can here.

Is this one reason behind our high voter turnout on election day? That people actually don’t want to be labelled as not having voted, and hence having shown their displeasure at one particular tribe, be it red, blue or green? I find this really surprising and hope the political parties will agree together soon, in the very near future, to stop this practise, if it exists.

We are living in a very funny explosive sort of a world. A world which seems to be going backwards, instead of forwards. A world where civilisations are clashing instead of learning about and respecting their differences. A world where views, be they religious, moral or political, seem to be hardening rather than softening. A world where a set of cartoons can lead to so much trouble. A world where a little country like Malta needs to push its form of Catholicism on its money, no less as if this in any way at all proves our moral superiority to the rest.

Never mind that our rates of everything in Malta, from child abuse to wife beating, from political responsibility to moral rot are at least as high as anywhere else. We have to throw over our Christian mask and say we are better because we are Christian.

Within this sort of climate and context, we really need to practise our freedoms and not just preach them. Malta is a democracy. We have the right to vote and the right not to vote too. The latter, like the former, is an entirely private and personal decision which all our political parties should not only respect, but actually promote at every opportunity.

Freedom is not a point of arrival. Freedom is something you have to work every day at sustaining. The habit of ours of putting political parties’ prerogatives before individual freedoms is something to be abhorred.

I hope that the two political leaders of this country will not only visit each other in their respective headquarters, will not only pat each other on the back and smile at the cameras and continue in the recent trend of being friendlier with each other than what used to happen in the past.

I hope they will put the citizen first and truly in every sense. I hope they will not ask the Electoral Commission for such information. I hope the Electoral Commission will stop compiling this information immediately, if it does.

And I absolutely fail to understand how any Data Protection Act in this country could allow the Electoral Commission to tell any political party whether he, or she, or they voted on voting day. Are we just paying lip service to the individual freedoms which data protection is meant to enhance – and more important, is our commitment to democracy half-baked?