h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You can't prevent it. You can only make it harder, and therefore less likely, and/or minimise its impact on the overall result.

Mol

I think you are right you cannot prevent it,but I think we should expect more even if it is not that realistic an aspiration.In an ideal world we would have a reliable and democratic electoral voting system.

I'm in the East Midlands, we had a Postal Ballot, it was compulsory, and we had many misgivings. Firstly, the person who signed the form as a witness could be "anybody who knows you" (!!) My friend asked the Local Authority if his 6 year old son could witness his signature, and was told that he could! (Imagine a home with frail elderly people, or shared accomodation where voting forms could just "Go missing")
Secondly, as has been mentioned, the Postal service has, for whatever reason become very unreliable, how do we know that our votes got there?
Thirdly, You really do feel deprived, for not being able to actually cast your ballot in person. Didn't think it would matter, but it did!!
Fourthly...(and I can hardly bring myself to say this!) Robert Kilroy-Silk won!!!

I'm sure we were asked for ID before voting in the last General Election, but i fwe weren't then we should be surely!!

I live in a small village and the only ID i remember offering at the local elections last year was my voting card.
Having said that the idea of postal voting fills me with deep misgivings.
The post here can best be described as erratic and some important mail goes missing each year.

"(Imagine a home with frail elderly people, or shared accomodation where voting forms could just "Go missing")"

I have an elderly relative in sheltered accommodation in Newcastle and when they had the postal votes on regional assemblies some labour party volenteers offered to help the residents fill out their votes.
Not many took them up on it as they were quite capable of doing it themselves.

But as it stands the whole system of postal voting is wide open to abuse.Until serious safeguards are put into place we must rightly be suspicious.

I remember being excited the first time i went to vote ~ i felt however naively that i now had a chance to influence the world i lived in.I don't think you'll ever get the same feeling from filling in a form and sticking it in the post

That's it exactly Pixel, there's no magic in it.

I had to wait until 1987, when I was 21 to vote for the first time, and the idea of having a voice, and casting my vote as a protest against the incumbent, decadent mosters was just.. well, magical!!
I still feel that way about it and think that we should have the choice to turn out in person and cast our votes, it's very important to see that justice is done.


as an aside, does anyone know why we can't have Elections on a Sunday?

When you see news footage of people queuing for hours and in some cases risking their lives in countries like Afghanistan or South Africa it shames me that the right to vote seems to mean so little to some in this country.
I have exercised my right to vote at every opportunity and think it would be terrible if new voters never got to experince that moment when your vote drops in hat box and just for a second you know that you can change the world we live in.

I don't know of any legal reason we couldn't vote on Sunday ~ i imagine its down to tradition and that the politicians would change it if they saw any advantage to themselves.

The news of the Birmingham Postal ballot does seem to have disappeared doesn't it.

I can remember being disappointed the first time I voted - I expected some sort of questioning to determine I was who I said I was, and that I really was old enough to vote. Instead I handed my card to an old boy who never even looked up, just stamped my paper and gave it to me.

Come to think about it I never have been asked for ID when I have voted.Seems ridiculous really doesn't it?

Well, it dates from a system introduced when many people voting for the first time couldn't read or write or possibly even sign their name, so any written form of identity would be useless. The person at the polling station would therefore ask the voter to *declare* their identity - and that's exactly what happens today, you don't actually need your poll card (although it helps the polling station staff )

One reason for having the same staff on duty all day at each polling station is so that somebody who has declared themselves to be Joe Bloggs in the morning can't easily come back and say they are Jack Smith in the afternoon - or at least, not to the same polling station. This is particularly true in rural areas where at least one of the station staff is likely to live in the area and has a fair chance of spotting a cheat. Easier to carry out significant (ie, result-changing) electoral fraud in urban areas, and by post - as Birmingham showed.

If 40% of people don't turn up to claim their vote, then that's a lot of spare votes that could be rounded up on election day. The problem is that if somebody at 3pm "steals" the vote of an elector who then turns up in person at 8pm, there will be a massive hue and cry and heaven only knows what fallout (well, not heaven only knows, it's just that I don't know, I'd assume it would go to court). And that's exactly what your average election-rigger doesn't want, a big investigation, result declared invalid, election re-run.

After all, part of the point of Birmingham was that the perpetrators *were* caught, isn't it?

I've probably said it already in this thread (sorry, I'm starting to lose track) but our system of electoral registration and voting is based on trust. When people register to vote, we (ie, electoral administrators) have to accept at face value the information we are given. There are almost certainly people (eg foreign nationals) who are registered to vote but who are not actually entitled to vote - they won't be caught, and it's unfair. Equally, there will be people whose vote has been signed away to an unscrupulous relative or carer. We really can't do a great deal about these relatively infrequent abuses of the system, unless we move to a significantly higher level of policing of the system than exists at present, and that in itself (I would argue) may represent a threat to the democratic process. Do you really want every application to register to vote triple checked against official data sources?

The potential problem is with vote-rigging through large scale electoral fraud, which is a different threat to democracy and does need to be addressed. The sweeping condemnation of the "banana republic" is a great soundbite, but I don't think it's actually hugely helpful. How can we be sure that the person casting the vote is the person entitled to cast the vote?

In our office, we won't issue or cancel a postal vote unless we have a signed piece of paper. But the thing is ... we've no idea what anybody's signature looks like So how do we sort that one?

Mol
ver' ver' drunk
long day in the (elections) office

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/1322171.stm

Yet another stuff-up on the postal voting front.
I can't find the link but there was another story about how thousands of servicemen were being disenfranchised because of the new systems.
Service personnel used to sign up for postal voting once when they enlisted but now they have to reregister every twelve months.
The campaign literature to make overseas servivcemen/women aware of this was not sent to the MOD until Feb 4th.
They in turn did not send it out for another two weeks.
The idea that men and women who are currently risking their lives in the name of our country being denied the right to vote is sickening.

Afternon All,

I just caught the tail end of a disturbing report on World at One , with an interview with a Returning Officer (Huntingdon I think) who came up with some pretty alarming comments about the inability of his system to cope with the hugely increased demand for Postal Votes. As I understood it the volume meant that the staff who would normally look out for fraud could now only look at (say) 30 requests from one address or 90% of one street applying for Ballot Forms

There was much more about the big Unions inviting people to apply for a postal vote through pre-printed forms in the Union News Letters;
the form apparently had a space for the applicants address....which if left blank could be misused.

Taken in connection with the Birmingham trial it is rather disturbing. Note that I a NOT connecting the Union Forms and Birmingham. I am concerned that as usual it is a worthwhile scheme , ill thought out, and with little protaction against fraud at this late stage.

Novo

Curious about the servicemen...

Not sure what the current situation is, but certainly, when I was a serviceman, 90% of the armed forces voted for the Conservative party.
If that's still the case then Labour are definitely onto a winner if the servicemen can't vote.


Read into that piece of information what you will...

I haven't got the exact figures but the number of servicemen registered to postal vote has dropped from arond 150000 at the last election to around 40000 this time.

Yeah, we have few service voters now. Can't remember exactly how the system has changed - I think they used to register through the service, and now they have to do it through their home council, which is not so convenient.

We certainly don't have time to check for fraud, and it's not helped by voters having filled in party political postal vote applications (ie ones organised by the main political parties, not generated by us in the office) and not realising what they've signed up for. Much miffedness among the electorate that this now can't be altered (Tuesday was the deadline for this).

Mol

What's the deal about the request forms some of the big unions were sending out.
They were designed to be filled in and returned to union offices but they didn't have to be put in envelopes so anyone could see the details.
With the issue of multiple postal votes going to single addresses ~why can't the requests be crossreferenced with the electoral role so that they can only be sent to registered voters at personal addresses?

1. A postal vote can only be obtained through the electoral authority and issued to somebody who is already on the electoral register.
2. If we were sending multiple postal votes to a single address (for a property other than a care home/hostel/commune, I mean), we would check.

A postal vote (and we've just issued a few thousand of the damn things) goes to an individual, at the address specified by the individual on the piece of paper that that individual has signed to make the arrangement.

We have processed hundreds, maybe thousands, of postal vote applications which were given to us on forms produced by, and collected in by, the main political parties. It has become clear today that many people filled in the form without reading it properly and were very surprised to find a ballot paper arriving in the post this morning. In most cases we were able to produce a copy of the annual canvass form as well, and the signature on the postal vote application matched (not in all cases, because it is possible to re-register during the canvass by phone, in which case we have no signature) - at which point the elector accepted that the error was theirs and nobody was stealing their identity, and undertook to supply us with a written instruction to cancel the postal vote for future elections.

There is no logic in applying for a postal vote in somebody else's name to be sent to that person's address; the elector will open the letter and think "wtf" and query it - they do that even if they made the application . The electors on the phone today who were hopping up and down with agitation at the prospect of electoral fraud completely missed this point. 200 postal votes going to a single address (which would be a more effective method of fraud) is suspicious, to say the least, and it certainly wouldn't go unnoticed at the mailing stage.

But we are a small authority, with only 10% of the electorate opting to vote by post.

Best complaint today was from somebody demanding to know why there wasn't a Liberal Democrat candidate in her area, as this simply wasn't good enough. She wasn't very pleased with my polite explanation that we merely process the nominations and send out the ballot papers, we don't choose the candidates.

*Important notice* New postal or proxy vote applications (original paper document - not faxed, not pdf) need to be with your electoral authority by next Tuesday 26 April 5pm.

Mol

for all the info.
so far this week i've had forms courtesy of the tories and the Lib/Dems to help me register for a postal vote i've never enquired about or wanted.

Now that we all know that many students have wound up with two votes because they registered at home and the universities registered them at the school;will there be special checks to ensure they don't vote twice or are we supposed to trust them all to do the right thing?
Not a dig at students just at human nature.

Students are the only group of people that we actively encourage to register at two addresses, but we do point out at the time of registration that they can only vote in one place (and also that there aren't actually any Special Elections Police so this is, like so much of our electoral system, based on trust).

I do think this is valid, because the 18-21 age group is one that we as a society need to encourage to engage in the elections process, and if they are deprived of their vote by not being registered in the right place at the right time, it's hardly an incentive for them to take an interest.

We have had some students who wanted to vote in one place for the local election, and at their other registered address for the parliamentary election (one of these would have to be by an absent voting arrangement, ie postal or proxy). I also happen to think that this is OK, particularly for students in this area, which is an extremely safe conservative parliamentary seat (so a vote any other way is interpreted as a waste of a vote - whereas a student at university in a more marginal seat would understandably be more interested in voting there), but with a county council liable to swing. A student planning on returning here in the long-term would have some justification in voting in local elections at their home address.

Until we have (dare I say this) some form of identification, which identifies each elector *in the country* individually, and is swiped at the time of casting a vote, then we cannot prevent people who are registered in more than one area from voting more than once. If effort is going to be put into detecting unlawful voting, then I personally think it should go into uncovering people who have obtained more than one vote by registering at more than one address *in the same electoral area* (see today's The Times: I think it was 32 postal votes going to 5 addresses on the same street, some of which were derelict or empty houses).

One way of doing this might be to make more use of canvassers when the new register is prepared each year in the autumn; ie, a canvasser employed by the local elections office calls at each address and obtains the signature of each elector. Canvassers are still used, but this is less widespread - more use is made nowadays of postal canvassing (ie, the annual registration forms are sent out and returned by post, with no face-to-face contact, and nobody walking the street making a note of empty or now non-existent properties). There is also pressure on this system from e-government initiatives, which ultimately require councils to offer annual registration at addresses where there are no additions/deletions to the existing register entry, by phone/email.

But the *real* culprit in terms of double registration has to be the introduction of the rolling registration service. When somebody moves, they apply to go on the register at their new address, and their new elections office informs their old elections office that they have re-registered in the new area. The old elections office can then remove the electors from their register. The old elections office *cannot* remove electors without this authorisation from the new elections office, except during the annual canvass, when the register gets cleaned up. This means that if electors move, register with a new authority, and don't give the new authority their old address, they stay on the register at their old address until 1 December - and possibly longer, if the new occupants of their old house don't return the annual canvass form! (most authorities will "carry-over" electors listed at a property which does not return a form for one year).

If the fraud at Birmingham, and any fraud in this election, exposes the holes in the current system, and there are plenty of them, then that can't be a bad thing. But it has to be said that the vast majority of people are reasonably law-abiding and only vote once even if they do happen to received two sets of poll cards and a postal vote (which has happened). Indeed, so far as local elections are concerned, the vast majority of people can't be bothered to vote even once, so I don't think we should be unduly concerned about anybody that happens to vote twice. The fact that we are all here talking about this is in itself an indication that we *are* the sort of people that care about what happens in elections, and are aware of what might be going on. There are plenty of people out there who are absolutely, completely clueless (the tales I could tell ) (I'll reveal all next week). Our concern should be with the detection and prevention of organised, significant electoral fraud (such as happened at Birmingham). The odd student who thinks it's a lark to hop on a train and vote twice ... there are far worse things that could happen.

I'm more concerned with the report I had this week from an elector that residents of a nursing home were only given their postal voting application forms (issued by us last October) on 26 April - too late for submission. That's 30 vulnerable people who have effectively been disenfranchised - in one electoral area, in one district, in one constituency. Multiply that upwards and *that* is something to worry about.

Mol

for our resident expert ~ i didn't really expect a reply ~ thought you'd be all worn out this week.
What actually bothered me about the student story was that they'd all been registered by the colleges.The double registering wasn't deliberate on the part of the students but is apparently the law that the college must register all residents.I wonder why the students weren't better informed.Back in the dim and distant past i don't remember anyone voting at college we all voted in our home towns as a matter of course.
The story about the home is terrible ~ lets hope its not too wide spread.