A World to Win has had a flurry of emails in response to our call to withhold our votes on May 5 as part of a campaign to build an alternative to the present undemocratic system. Most are in favour. But some feel strongly that even if we oppose the major parties as well as the political system, we are still obliged to use our right to vote to register a protest on election day.

This, it is suggested, can be achieved by doing something different with the ballot paper rather than putting a cross against a candidate's name, as voters are expected to do. Some members of the European Creative Forum have written to say that "failure to register an opinion renders you voiceless". They suggest that we write "ABSTENTION" across our ballot papers and that "this will be counted as a real and meaningful snub to the politicians".

In practice, however, such actions cannot produce the desired effect. According to the electoral regulations, any ballot paper that is not marked correctly - for whatever reason - is put aside when the count is made. These will include ballots that are blank, defaced or where the voter's intention is unclear. For example, in 2001, some 22,500 people managed to vote for more than one candidate while another 70,000 were voided because they were "unmarked or voided for uncertainty".

In its official report on the 2001 general election, the Electoral Commission noted: "While an NOP poll for The Sunday Times published on 20 May 2001 indicated that a significant proportion (35%) of people agreed with the statement 'none of the political parties really deserves my support', there is no straightforward way to register an abstention in UK elections. The option usually used is to 'spoil' the ballot paper, but there is no ready means of distinguishing a deliberately spoilt ballot from a ballot paper completed erroneously."

Crucially, when the election results are announced, they do not include the numbers of spoilt ballots. The results for each constituency simply give the number of votes cast for each candidate. Only much later can you find information out about spoilt papers and only then by consulting research papers based on data collected from local returning officers. In 2001, the total was 100,005 or 0.38% of the total.

Which brings us to another salient point. Spoilt ballot papers are, in fact, counted as part of the official turnout. In other words, if 300 people can vote and 100 do so, the turnout is 33%. If a proportion of these 100 spoil their vote, the turnout still remains at 33%.

So, far from registering a significant protest, the more people disfigure their ballot papers, the higher the turnout. Then, on the surface, it looks as if more and more people are endorsing the existing political process when the intention on the part of those who wrote "abstain" was to do precisely the opposite!

The idea that we can "snub politicians" by writing abstention on a ballot paper is, in this way, a non-starter. And just to make sure we can't encourage rejection of mainstream parties and candidates on polling day, the Electoral Commission has stepped in with a new ruling. The commission has banned attempts by organisations to register as "None of the Above" for the purposes of the 2005 election. That's "democracy" for you!

By calling on people to withhold their votes except in the handful of places where there are worthy anti-war, anti-New Labour candidates, we don't demean the sacrifice of previous generations who fought for the right to vote. On the contrary, we demean it by lending credibility in any way to the farce which democracy has become in the period of corporate-driven globalisation.

To say that non-voting is simply a sign of apathy is to miss the reasons for the sharp decline in turnout to just 59.4% in 2001. Indeed, Ferdinand Mount, of the Power Inquiry (the current inquiry into political participation chaired by Helena Kennedy QC) says: "What has struck us is not so much the apathy as the active and passionate distaste for politics and politicians which has engulfed large parts of the British electorate."

Spoiling your vote may be an "act of conscience" but no one else will ever know or be able to identify you. We can't join together with others who also reject the existing parties and power structures on this basis. It remains a secret individual act of protest, but gets us nowhere in showing others that there is a real force of people out there who want an alternative.

Deliberately withholding your vote, on the other hand, is a first step in declaring that the existing undemocratic system cannot be allowed to continue. The immediate next step is join together to rally support for making our votes mean something again by struggling for a truly democratic society. In this way, we can turn the negative action of non-voting into a positive way forward, where voters can actually determine their own future. That is why we are organising the launch on June 4 of an organisation around the ideas put forward in A World to Win