Vote early, vote often

According to David Hencke, the Guardian's Westminster correspondent, this Thursdays elections across the country

could go down in history as the point when fraud, corruption and mismanagement made a mockery of the electoral process in Britain.

The reason is because of all the new experimental voting and counting procedures which have not been properly thought out. Worse, some of the experiments have been based on laws that, ministers have just discovered, were not properly drafted in the first place.

I have already taken a look at the demise of the secret ballot here. The BBC has a report here that over 20,000 postal votes have dropped off the register in Birmingham since the last election, when massive fraud was discovered after the elections. And I posted earlier on the new E-Count system where I said

As this is the first large scale use of the system you would have thought the numpties on the Scottish Executive (Labour/Lib Dems) would have had enough sense to at least follow some of the calls of the Electoral Commission who asked for e-counting to be independently verified more than three years ago to boost voter confidence but nothing has been done.

So what confidence can we have in the election counts being correct, secret and fair. It's time to rethink this mess and get back to some semblance of fairness to both voters and candidates, before we become as suspect as countries like Zimbabwe or Nigeria.

Vote early, vote often

Tell me no secrets - Postal Voting

John M Morrison has the following article in Comment is Free at the Guardian. In it he states

Absent voting is fundamentally incompatible with the secrecy of the ballot - and without this principle elections are neither free nor fair.

His contention , which I would tend to agree with, is that the voting is not secret unless it is done in person at the ballot box where it can be done fairly and in secrecy. No one can see your vote and no one can check, if you are being coerced, that you have done what you said you would do.

Continuing on the secrecy theme he points out

Gladstone understood the strange paradox of the secret ballot: the honesty and integrity of the electoral system as a whole is underpinned by giving each individual voter the freedom to lie to family members, neighbours and community leaders about how he or she has voted. Postal voting, by shifting the voting process into the family and the community, reopens the door to the abuses that Gladstone's great reform successfully eliminated.

Basically what he is saying is that the nature of the secret ballot, is, that it allows us to vote in the way that we want, despite outside influences that say voting for a particular party is a betrayal of your upbringing, your colour, your creed or your religion.

He also points out that if France can manage an 85% turnout with no postal voting then why can't we in the UK manage this. They have much the same sort of lifestyles but take the time to vote.

His other problem with the postal vote is how it is administered and used. This has been the subject of many stories in the press , a few are here and here and some more here.

The last article shows how lessons learnt in England are not being followed up in Scotland as ballot signatures are not being checked and date of birth checks on some papers will happen south of the Border, but not in Scotland.
He has the following to say on this

The government pays lip service to cleaning up postal voting, but has no real intention of putting the clock back to the days when it was only available to those voters who could not get to the polling station. Labour's increasing reliance on dodgy postal votes explains why it has resisted calls for individual voter registration, and why it still allows political parties to go around banging on doors collecting up completed(or in some cases uncompleted) ballot papers. Instead of relying on the ballot box and the polling station to stop abuses, it has brought in a voluntary code of conduct for parties on how they should handle applications and postal ballot papers. Behind closed doors, who knows how many people are being influenced or instructed about how to fill in their ballot papers? The police have been briefed to be on the lookout for abuses in the May 3 elections, but how many people are going to shop members of their family/ community to the police for insisting that they vote Labour?

He finishes off by saying

Perhaps postal voting on demand really is as popular as the government says it is. I doubt it. Most people know it is a scam far worse than anything perpetrated in the world of TV phone-ins. When dodgy elections are held elsewhere, in Nigeria, Russia or Zimbabwe, the UK government would be well advised not to be too critical.

I agree with him that we should curtail postal voting, we are already on the way to becoming a third world nation under the current Labour Government, we shouldn't allow our voting system to become third rate as well.

Tell me no secrets ...