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I'm wondering if you misunderstood. I'm saying, folks should go to their polling place, ask for a ballot and intentionally submit it blank. You still get marked down as having voted, and those ballots would conceivably get counted along with marked ballots under voter turnout stats, but it wouldn't be counted in the results.
Having run elections before, blank ballots we just put in a pile and basically ignore. Those who are written on but not filled out correctly, we did have to report on specifics, but blank ones the only thing we reported was the number, and given we don't know if it was supposed to be a protest or someone's pen didn't work and they failed to notice or something else, we didn't actually carry that through to our election reports in any meaningful way. There are always blank votes, but being blank doesn't actually tell you the person meant to submit it blank.
Your assumption is that the people running the elections will interpret a blank vote the same way you meant it. I am not sure at all that is true.
If there were some kind of publicized campaign (Vote for none of the above!) then maybe. But without it, a blank vote doesn't carry useful information in and of itself.
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Yes, I understand you correctly. I've had the discussion on not voting vs false/unmarked voting vs protest voting a bunch of times by now. Whether you keep it blank or do whatever else that results in your vote not counting, it will at best just not end up being noticed at all. The voter turnout is high, the good parties are being voted for, everything is fine. At worst, if people look at statistics on unmarked/wrong ballots they'll just conclude you're to dumb to fill out the ballot appropriately. I've seen that literal reaction in action "oh did you know that like 10% of ballots end up not being counted because they're unmarked or so? That seems high." "Yeah some people can't even vote lol".
Imo the correct course of action is either not voting (after all, if you're disillusioned about something, you would usually not continue engaging in it) or protest vote.
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