Please spare me your smug polling station selfies – the ballot box isn’t the place for virtue signalling

A picture can tell a thousand words – but it doesn’t always. A picture of someone standing proudly outside a polling station, vote cast, for example, tells just one word: smug.

I don’t wish to be mean. Exercising one’s democratic right is a serious business, and not a moment for soundbites – and yes, we’ve all at some point felt the hand of history on our shoulder as we put our cross next to a candidate’s name with the kind of tiny pencil usually reserved for pre-digital Argos. However, people have been quietly voting for decades without feeling the need to mark the occasion by posting a snap on Instagram.

Last Thursday, as the polls opened in various parts of the country, social media platforms saw a steady stream of virtue signalling. There were selfies of bearded dads taking their two-year-olds for a first trip to stick it to the Tories. There were artful images of polling station signs bathed in sunshine or nestled in a bush. And there was, of course, an endless array of doggy snapshots, each canine joining the many thousands of mutts who have unwittingly become part of a long-running internet meme.

All of these images were unique in their own way, but each of them really told the same tale about the person who created it: “Look at me, I have done something very important and am an excellent citizen!”

You could, I suppose, say something similar about people who post photos of their lunch: “I can cook!” Or photos of sunny pathways: “Look, look, I am healthy and outdoorsy!” And you’d be right about those, too. We all have our weak spots.

But there is something uniquely unappealing about the polling station poseur. It’s not merely the smugness of their voting prowess that is there for all to see in their happy snaps, but also the insidious question each picture implies: “Haven’t you done your civic duty?” Never mind that there might be a perfectly good reason why someone has decided not to vote – we’re not in Australia yet, cobber.

As it happens, the one selfie I would have wanted to see on Thursday was Boris Johnson giving a big thumbs up shortly before being turned away from his polling station for failing to bring the very ID he decided to make a requirement for voting. Regrettably, this seems to be one of the very few times when a foul-up by the former PM hasn’t been caught on camera.

While BoJo failed to deliver on this occasion (maybe he forgot his phone as well as his ID), perhaps politicians are partly to blame for the modern obsession with being seen to exercise our democratic birthright. After all, once upon a time, it was only parliamentary candidates that we’d see arriving at polling stations – their bright smiles in the next day’s papers or the evening news. If they can turn voting into performance art, why can’t anyone?

The answer to that question ought to be self-evident: no one in their right mind would want to make themselves more like a politician. So maybe it’s not the influence of gurning MPs that is to blame, but simply that other torment of our times, social media, that has convinced us that everyone else in the world needs to know our every move.

I did, in fact, have an election in my neck of the woods last week – for the hotly contested post of police and crime commissioner of Hertfordshire. Regrettably, I didn’t think to capture the moment I filled in my postal ballot for the rest of you to see on TikTok, as I was too busy trying to make sure my signature didn’t stray outside the box, and that I put the correct form in the right-coloured envelope. Such was the level of complexity that a picture for posterity might almost have been worth it.

Whatever the prime minister has in mind for the coming months, we know we won’t have to wait very long until polling stations next open their doors. Vote if you want to; don’t if you don’t. Do it by post, send a proxy – or, if you must, take your dog and your extended family with you to watch you cast your ballot. Definitely remember to take photo ID. But please, even though you’re fulfilling your civic right, that doesn’t mean we all need to see you do it.