A Place to Stand

In the 2005 election up to four million people are believed to have requested a postal ballot . This was when the judge in the Birmingham vote fraud case had said

There are no systems to deal realistically with fraud and there never have been. Until there are, fraud will continue unabated", that "Frauds of this magnitude require a considerable degree of organisation and manpower, not to mention supervision and co-ordination. It would be unthinkable for them to be the work of a few hothead activists", & of Prescott's reforms which made fraud possible on this scale that this was "positive assistance to fraud "...... "Short of writing 'Steal Me' on the envelopes, it is hard to see what more could be done to ensure their coming into the wrong hands".

Well something has clearly been done - postal voting & one must presume, fraud is massively increased.

Figures collected from more than 20 of the most marginal areas following Tuesday's deadline to register to vote indicate across-the-board increases in the electorate, compared with the last general election, suggesting that turnout could soar on 6 May.

In one area, the increase is as high as 17%, and there are also indications of a dramatic surge in people requesting postal votes.

The volume of postal vote requests doubled in some areas compared with 2005, putting electoral administration systems under pressure and raising new concerns about postal voting fraud

This is confirmed by a Tweet from the Labour candidate in Bristol East reported by Guido.

Guido just got off the phone with Electoral Services in Bristol East a couple of hours ago, after being disturbed and puzzled to see a tweet about the contents of postal votes published a short time ago by Kerry McCarthy, Labour’s Twitter Tsar and candidate in Bristol East.

... Because announcing these results prematurely can affect the outcome of the whole election, however, they’re under strict confidentiality rules. Bristol Electoral Services are now looking into it as a matter of urgency…

It would apparently be legally dodgy to give the exact figures, though Guido has a picture appearing to show them. However it would be wrong to deny that over 70% of them went to Labour. In 2005 Labour got 49.5% of the vote in a much less crowded 3 horse race. Reporting on the obvious amount of voter apathy in the election & even the poor viewing figures for the "debates" which have been the main focus European Referendum says

there has been an "unprecedented" surge in the number of people registering to vote in next Thursday's election. From the south coast of England to central Scotland, local authorities are reporting increases of up to 17 percent, with a consistent trend across major cities, suburban constituencies and rural seats. The surge is apparently at its most pronounced in areas with crucial marginal seats.

The London Borough of Islington said 135,769 people had registered to vote on 6 May, compared with 116,176 at the time of the last election in 2005, a rise of 17 percent. In neighbouring Hackney, registrations have gone up 15 percent.

The number of voters on the electoral roll has increased by 8 percent in Leeds, equivalent to an extra 18,000 voters. It also went up by 6 percent in Newcastle and by 4 per cent in both Sheffield and Manchester. A call centre set up by Manchester City Council received more than 1,000 calls a day after the first leaders' debate on 15 April. The authority reported an "unprecedented" 7,000 people registering to vote during this month.

Returning officers, we are told, attribute the "remarkable" increase to the interest generated by the three televised leaders' debate and the three-horse nature of the contest. That may or may not be the case, but does not fit with the declining viewing figures.

In another article European Referendum highlights a comment from an ordinary person on a newspaper online

For no reason my name was removed from the electoral register in a London labour area, to rectify this I visited the local council with all the necessary paperwork to re-register. The officer at the council showed me his computer screen to validate my details, what was then immediately noticeable that some moderate sized houses on my road had 40-50 registered voters registered to them which were at most able to accommodate 8 people.

I pointed this discrepancy out to the officer, and he shrugged his shoulders. Because of this and the various cases of voter fraud in the past few decades, I no longer have faith in the electoral system

Four million plus 17% is 4.7 million easily enough to turn any election indeed it is more than half of the entire Labour 8.8 million in 2005.

I do not see that it is going to be possible to trust the result in any circumstance. After the Birmingham fraud trial I said that postal ballots results should be announced separately from conventional ones & that where the postal ballot results have been significantly different from the conventional ones they should be investigated by the police checking a random selection of them & that where the differential postal ballots have changed the results the returning officer should not certify the result until this has been done.

If this sort of practice were going on in Iran or Ukraine or Russia or any country our government wants us to dislike the media would certainly be reporting that western "N"GOs had called the election fraudulent. Indeed they did so despite their being no clear evidence of such blatant fraud as here. They even said it about the Afghan result which seems more in keeping with what can happen here.

Labels: British politics, election, Social