If you want to vote in next month’s Assembly election, you have less than one week to make sure that you’re registered.

Registration is a particularly big issue ahead of this snap election. In December 2016, over 60,000 names were removed from the Electoral Register in cases where the Electoral Office did not receive a response to their verification exercise back in 2013. That’s almost the total number of voters in an entire constituency.

Many of these will have been removed from the Register for good reasons: people might have moved house, moved constituencies, or moved away from Northern Ireland altogether.

Others, however, may have been removed unintentionally: by simply not completing a form and returning it to the Electoral Office.

To make sure that you are registered to vote, you can call the Electoral Office helpline on 0800 4320 712. If you need to register from scratch, visit http://www.eoni.org.uk/Register-To-Vote/Register-to-vote-change-address-change-name

You may, of course, have a very basic question. Why should you bother to vote in the first place?

Turnout in elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly stood at 70 percent in 1998. It has declined in every single one ever since. In May last year, just 55 percent of eligible voters chose to cast a ballot.

Some people might think that falling turnout is a good thing. Perhaps it could be a sign of ‘normalisation’. Perhaps it could be an indication that people are getting more relaxed about politics, and might even be so content with the way things are going that they don’t feel the need to express an opinion.

This doesn’t square with the evidence. When the Assembly returned in 2007, more people were satisfied than dissatisfied with the performance of MLAs. The picture was significantly reversed by 2014 (the most recent year for which data is available).

In that year only 11 percent of respondents to the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey expressed satisfaction with the performance of politicians; 66 percent expressed dissatisfaction. In other words, MLAs had a net approval rating of -55. Yes, -55.

That was three years ago. There’s little reason to expect that the figures would have improved much for MLAs. If anything, people almost certainly think less highly of them.

For some perspective, Donald Trump currently has an approval rating of -7 – and that’s considered fairly poor. Multiply ‘fairly poor’ by at least six for a sense of people’s approval of Northern Ireland’s elected representatives.

The point is this: if low turnout is ever justified, it is almost certainly not justified when approval ratings are so abysmally low.

At this point, you might reply with a standard (and tiresome) rebuttal: “But sure they’re all the same. They’re all as bad as each other! There’s just no point…”

That could be true. But it almost certainly isn’t. Political parties aren’t all the same. They deliberately take different positions and present different platforms because they want to appeal to different people.

Crucially, since May, some parties have been in government, and some have been in opposition. If you want for electoral accountability to mean anything, then it would be sensible to follow a general rule of thumb.

If you have been happy with the performance of the government over the last eight months, it would probably be a good idea to vote for one of the parties of government. If you have been generally unhappy with the performance of the government over the last eight months, it would probably be a good idea to vote for a different party. That is what it takes to reward and punish, to hold parties to account.

Say you do the latter. You do so in the risk that by the time of the next election things are still the same or – worse – things are worse than they are now. “See, it made no difference,” you might say. In that case, you should still apply the same rule of thumb all over again.

It’s for very good reason. Political parties might behave in a similar fashion in government. But if they know that voters aren’t going to reward success or punish failure, then they certainly don’t have any real incentive to perform well.

On the other hand, if parties recognise that voters will actually punish them, then they will have a very real incentive to govern competently, effectively and with integrity.

We as voters can’t vote for a government to be successful, but we can give it the incentive to be successful.

So, are you registered to vote?