Today I have put forward a formal demand and a warm appeal: the formal demand is to the Minister of the Interior and to the President of the Council and the warm appeal is to the President of the Republic, asking for the redesign of the voting papers. This form is designed in such a way that the citizens cannot know nor can they work out which parties support the coalitions.

I’ll explain this better. But I’m asking you to have a look at this example of a voting paper. It has a box for each party. There is a row of boxes at the top and another row underneath. That’s true for the Senate. The same applies for the Lower House. In reality, in these elections, the game is to be played out between the two coalitions: the coalition led by Berlusconi, that has three parties, and the coalition led by Veltroni, that has two parties supporting it. How can you know which are these two coalitions? Each of us, when we go to vote, will find a load of parties, and it’s not obvious who is supporting whom, nor which party is supporting which candidate for the position of leader. The result is that each of us will be likely to, just because of that mass media message that Berlusconi is putting forward, and anyway the major parties, to vote for the biggest party so as not to throw away your vote. This is not the truth.

Veltroni is supported by two parties: the Democratic Party, but also by Italia dei Valori. So you have to know that the vote, to the Democratic Party or to Italia dei Valori, refers to the same programme and to the same candidate for the position of Premier. But in this way, with this design of the ballot paper, it is not obvious. It would have been enough to put the boxes in vertical columns, instead of horizontally, and we would have had intuitive and visual clarity about who are the two parties supporting the same candidate for the position of Premier.

I don’t want to believe that the reason why a design of this type has been used is exactly so as not to make it known that parties like Italia dei Valori are in an alliance, within a coalition and that they can ask for the useful vote. Personally, I think that the vote is useful for every party in which the voter trusts, but it is certainly a duty to make known to the voters which are the coalitions that support which candidate for the position of Premier.
Italia dei Valori is a political formation that is worth voting for, for two reasons: the first, of course, is because it is in a coalition and it is never a wasted vote; the second is because we of Italia dei Valori, unlike other parties of the coalition, we are committed to and we continue to commit all of us to certain fundamental topics: the conflict of interests, security, the reform of the justice system so that it can function, the elimination of “ad personam” laws, basically all that series of measures that give greater credibility to the institutions. We, for example, have not got as candidates people who are convicts, because we have requested a criminal records certificate, as well as election certificates. However, by using such a ballot paper, it seems that we have tarred everyone with the same brush, and this is no good.
Raise this issue. You too, do some campaigning to put the pressure on. Write to the institutions and to this blog as well. With this design, you will not be put in a condition of being able to exercise your right to vote properly.