Order of the Bath

The second thought on elections and voting relates to the scandal of the postal vote fraud in the 2004 local elections in Birmingham (and perhaps other places). This happened because polling booth voting has always been relatively relaxed with no requirement to prove identity on arrival and reasonably anonymous being quite hard to trace a vote cast back to the voter. They assumed that this could be carried across to a postal system with little change, no thought being given to possible intimidation and no checks made to ensure that the right people registered and that they were those that actually voted. With a postal system, rigging is much easier to organise as there is more time and it can be done out of sight of the officials.

It was said on the radio news that

Figures seen by the BBC suggest the problem was worse than first thought.

In four other wards, where there were allegations of fraud at the time but no formal enquiry, more than half the postal voters have disappeared from the list.

and I thought at the time that it was a rather rash assumption that all those that vanished were fraudulent. There are other reasons that could have influenced it; for example people who registered last time seeing the scandal and not wanting to be involved any more, or not wanting to go through the enhanced procedures being introduced this time. However I see from the written report that other wards have seen little change so perhaps there is some merit in it.

As a footnote, it is also my opinion that a large scale postal system denies the right of voters to hear and see all the arguments which typically are given right up to the day polls open. This typically works against the small and local parties who reply on the few weeks run up to polling day to get their message across.

This entry was posted on 2 May 2007 at 10:09 by Rick and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.