In a judgment issued today a judge (or more correctly, a Queen’s Counsel sitting as an election commissioner) has found six Labour Councillors from the Midlands city of Birmingham guilty of election fraud. The elections will now be re-run.
The judge had already commented that the system of allowing postal (absentee) votes meant that the system was open to fraud. This cannot be changed before the elections on 5 May but may cause problems for the government who have been pushing postal votes as a way of increasing turnout.
The systen was thought to favour Labour as higher turnouts generally do. Now we seem to have further evidence just why they seem so keen on it.
The case goes back to local Council elections in 2004 and concern two wards (local areas) which were both won by Labour. In one, Bordesley Green, a pro-Kashmiri independence party objected after a box of completed ballot papers appeared at the count under disputed circumstance. In Aston, the LibDems objected after it appears a large number of postal ballots had been diverted and filled in at a “votes factory” by people including the Labour candidates.
Richard Mawrey QC described the current system as !an open invitation to fraud”. Ballot papers are sent out with two envelopes and a declaration. The voter places the completed ballot in a smaller envelope and signs a declaration that they are the person on the electoral register. This has to be witnessed. The smaller envelope and the declaration are placed in a larger envelope and sent back to the Returning Officer by post. Alternatively they can be handed in up to the end of the election.
Further information and links at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/4406575.stm
Increased election turnout is, in general, a good thing. However if all that is happening is an increased number of fraudulent votes then it does not serve the cause of democracy.
Making postal votes easier has been the most effective way of increasing turnout, but as the Electoral Commission and now this Election Commissioner has concluded it increases the chances of fraud.
Election petitions have been very rare since the First World War, but if postal voting continues to be unrestricted they may become much more common.
My small rural county in northwest Washington state went to all-absentee ballots in 2001 as a cost-saving measure. I’ve never heard from anyone here that there’s been concern about fraud. Is it proven that there’s a higher rate of fraud than in ballots cast at polling places?
The problem, at least anecdotaly, originates from certain ethnic communities. If you look at the link in the diary you will see that the case in Birmingham involved various Muslim candidates exploiting loopholes in the law and the election officials being prepared to overlook irregularities and count the disputed ballots.
I know that in my own area of Slough our election officials rejected quite a number of postal ballots which, looking at the certificates of identity of the voter sent with the ballot envelopes, seemed to have been filled in by the same person.
The concern is that the rules on postal voting are now so lax that they encourage fraud. If this is seen to be widespread then the whole system of elections may be discredited. There could hardly be a graver threat to the integrity of a democracy.
(This is a quote from the Electoral Reform Society newsletter I received today)
On the last day of evidence to the
Election Court hearing into electoral
fraud in Birmingham, presiding judge
Richard Mawrey QC warned of the
dangers of fraud that the current law
on postal voting presented.
Mawrey stated that “even if I came to
the conclusion that the respondents in
both cases were entirely innocent, I
would not neglect to point out that
the law as it stands at the moment is
an open invitation to fraud. It seems to
me that I could not come to any other
conclusion, given the material that we
have before this court with this case.
Someone who was so inclined could
defraud the system”.
The case, as reported in last month’s
Bulletin, revolves around accusations
of fraud against six Labour councillors
in the wards of Bordesley Green and
Aston at last year’s local elections.
Mawrey is expected to deliver his
judgment on April 4th.
Liberal Democrat Ed Davey said that
“Ministers must make a statement to
the House of Commons to avoid chaos
during the general election. We will
need the Electoral Commission to
provide independent monitoring of
how postal voting operates and it is
going to be vital for postal votes to be
counted separately so monitors can
detect whether systematic fraud has
taken place”.
The Electoral Reform Society said that
“everyone will be looking more closely
at election results with a view to
challenging them if they are tightly
fought. People will no longer get away
with saying that fraud could not
happen in the UK”.