Another one...
Discussion
Vote rigging ex-councillor jailed
A former Labour councillor has been jailed for three and a half years for rigging postal votes.
Muhammed Hussain, 61, from Logwood Street, Blackburn, Lancashire, pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud local elections in May 2002.
He won a 685 majority in the elections for Bastwell ward on Blackburn Council.
But his lawyer, Philip Andrews, said in mitigation that the fraudulent votes would not have affected the final result. Hussain would still have won.
Judge Peter Openshaw said Mr Andrews' argument was "extremely unattractive".
Earlier this week, in a separate case involving Labour councillors in Birmingham, a judge said the UK's postal voting system would "disgrace a banana republic".
'Stolen votes'
An investigation found 233 votes were fraudulent, and Mr Hussain had arranged for campaigners to ask voters to hand over blank voting papers, telling them: "Don't worry, we'll take care of them".
The Tories, who came second, complained that more than 75% of people had applied for postal votes.
Mr Andrews handed in a petition of 700 signatures supporting the defendant, and said Mr Hussain had been of exemplary good character and a pillar of the community, but had now lost his standing.
But Mr Openshaw said Hussain was "entirely unfit" for public office but he was not allowed under current law to disqualify him from holding future posts.
He said it was a "public scandal" and told Hussain he was passing a "stiff" sentence to set an example to others.
He said the current postal voting system was "wide open to fraud", adding: "The defendant has literally stolen votes."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lancashire/4425519.stm
A former Labour councillor has been jailed for three and a half years for rigging postal votes.
Muhammed Hussain, 61, from Logwood Street, Blackburn, Lancashire, pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud local elections in May 2002.
He won a 685 majority in the elections for Bastwell ward on Blackburn Council.
But his lawyer, Philip Andrews, said in mitigation that the fraudulent votes would not have affected the final result. Hussain would still have won.
Judge Peter Openshaw said Mr Andrews' argument was "extremely unattractive".
Earlier this week, in a separate case involving Labour councillors in Birmingham, a judge said the UK's postal voting system would "disgrace a banana republic".
'Stolen votes'
An investigation found 233 votes were fraudulent, and Mr Hussain had arranged for campaigners to ask voters to hand over blank voting papers, telling them: "Don't worry, we'll take care of them".
The Tories, who came second, complained that more than 75% of people had applied for postal votes.
Mr Andrews handed in a petition of 700 signatures supporting the defendant, and said Mr Hussain had been of exemplary good character and a pillar of the community, but had now lost his standing.
But Mr Openshaw said Hussain was "entirely unfit" for public office but he was not allowed under current law to disqualify him from holding future posts.
He said it was a "public scandal" and told Hussain he was passing a "stiff" sentence to set an example to others.
He said the current postal voting system was "wide open to fraud", adding: "The defendant has literally stolen votes."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lancashire/4425519.stm
More detail in the Times:
Councillor jailed for vote fraud
By Dominic Kennedy and Jill Sherman
A Cabinet minister has had to accept that the postal voting system is flawed
THE postal voting system was condemned as wide open to fraud by the second judge in a week as a former Labour councillor was jailed yesterday for stealing 233 people’s votes.
Mohammed Hussain, 61, a member of Jack Straw’s Blackburn constituency party, was given what the judge called a stiff sentence of three years and seven months for tricking people into handing over blank ballot papers.
Judge Peter Openshaw said that he had no precedent for deciding punishment because election fraud on such a scale had been unknown in Britain for 100 years.
Judge Openshaw, the Recorder of Preston, identified what he called obvious vulnerabilities in the system just days after an election commissioner in Birmingham blamed postal voting for fraud that would “disgrace a banana republic”.
The Director of Public Prosecutions is studying the commissioner’s report on six Birmingham Labour councillors who stole 3,000 votes.
Yesterday’s case prompted calls for emergency measures to reform postal voting. Both cases this week have exposed Labour Party involvent in fraud and shown how postal voting is open to abuse.
Tony Blair has tried to play down the problem but Mr Straw, the Foreign Secretary, became the first minister to accept that the system is flawed. Mr Straw, who as Home Secretary created the Electoral Commission to give ministers impartial advice about voting, said last night that the next government would have to rethink postal voting.
“What has been exposed is serious weaknesses in the system which will have to be dealt with,” he said. “If the electoral process is corrupted, everybody suffers. Where weaknesses in the system are ascertained we will have to deal with them.”
The two judgments came after an investigation by The Times last year into allegations of fraud and intimidation involving all three main parties in the North West and Yorkshire and Humber regions.
Mr Hussain preyed on voters as he strove to win back his marginal seat on Blackburn council in Lancashire from the Conservatives in 2002.
Detectives said Mr Hussain was behind a systematic, organised campaign. He sent friends to collect postal ballots then arranged a “conveyor belt” at his home to put crosses next to his name. His behaviour had been “quite aggressive”.
Mr Hussain exploited weaknesses in voting reforms introduced in 2001 which give everybody the right to a postal vote.Previously, voters needed a specific reason such as military service, studying away from home or incapacity.
Next month’s general election will be the first fought under the new system, when 15 per cent of votes are likely to be cast by post.
Judge Openshaw said: “The extension of postal voting to all is attended by risks against which Parliament sought to introduce safeguards.” Every vote cast must be signed by the voter and witnessed by somebody who gives his address.
“However, since the electoral returning officer and his staff are inevitably unfamiliar with the voter or the witness and the signature of either, they do not know whether the witness has given a genuine address,” the judge said. “They have no means at all of knowing whether either is genuine. The system is therefore wide open to fraud.”
Preston Crown Court was told that people were persuaded to hand over their blank ballot papers by Mr Hussain’s supporters. Many spoke foreign languages or were poorly educated.
One man had moved house and did not vote but, when police opened the sealed ballot boxes and checked each ballot paper, they found that he had apparently voted Labour. The judge said Mr Hussain’s offence was more grave because he represented a party trusted by the electorate.
“The defendant did not stand for some fringe party,” he said. “The fact that he was the official Labour Party candidate is again a feature which will have led voters to believe that they could trust him and those who worked for him.”
Mr Hussain had set up two mosques in Blackburn, served on the Council of Mosques and the Council for Racial Equality.
www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-1560679,00.html
Councillor jailed for vote fraud
By Dominic Kennedy and Jill Sherman
A Cabinet minister has had to accept that the postal voting system is flawed
THE postal voting system was condemned as wide open to fraud by the second judge in a week as a former Labour councillor was jailed yesterday for stealing 233 people’s votes.
Mohammed Hussain, 61, a member of Jack Straw’s Blackburn constituency party, was given what the judge called a stiff sentence of three years and seven months for tricking people into handing over blank ballot papers.
Judge Peter Openshaw said that he had no precedent for deciding punishment because election fraud on such a scale had been unknown in Britain for 100 years.
Judge Openshaw, the Recorder of Preston, identified what he called obvious vulnerabilities in the system just days after an election commissioner in Birmingham blamed postal voting for fraud that would “disgrace a banana republic”.
The Director of Public Prosecutions is studying the commissioner’s report on six Birmingham Labour councillors who stole 3,000 votes.
Yesterday’s case prompted calls for emergency measures to reform postal voting. Both cases this week have exposed Labour Party involvent in fraud and shown how postal voting is open to abuse.
Tony Blair has tried to play down the problem but Mr Straw, the Foreign Secretary, became the first minister to accept that the system is flawed. Mr Straw, who as Home Secretary created the Electoral Commission to give ministers impartial advice about voting, said last night that the next government would have to rethink postal voting.
“What has been exposed is serious weaknesses in the system which will have to be dealt with,” he said. “If the electoral process is corrupted, everybody suffers. Where weaknesses in the system are ascertained we will have to deal with them.”
The two judgments came after an investigation by The Times last year into allegations of fraud and intimidation involving all three main parties in the North West and Yorkshire and Humber regions.
Mr Hussain preyed on voters as he strove to win back his marginal seat on Blackburn council in Lancashire from the Conservatives in 2002.
Detectives said Mr Hussain was behind a systematic, organised campaign. He sent friends to collect postal ballots then arranged a “conveyor belt” at his home to put crosses next to his name. His behaviour had been “quite aggressive”.
Mr Hussain exploited weaknesses in voting reforms introduced in 2001 which give everybody the right to a postal vote.Previously, voters needed a specific reason such as military service, studying away from home or incapacity.
Next month’s general election will be the first fought under the new system, when 15 per cent of votes are likely to be cast by post.
Judge Openshaw said: “The extension of postal voting to all is attended by risks against which Parliament sought to introduce safeguards.” Every vote cast must be signed by the voter and witnessed by somebody who gives his address.
“However, since the electoral returning officer and his staff are inevitably unfamiliar with the voter or the witness and the signature of either, they do not know whether the witness has given a genuine address,” the judge said. “They have no means at all of knowing whether either is genuine. The system is therefore wide open to fraud.”
Preston Crown Court was told that people were persuaded to hand over their blank ballot papers by Mr Hussain’s supporters. Many spoke foreign languages or were poorly educated.
One man had moved house and did not vote but, when police opened the sealed ballot boxes and checked each ballot paper, they found that he had apparently voted Labour. The judge said Mr Hussain’s offence was more grave because he represented a party trusted by the electorate.
“The defendant did not stand for some fringe party,” he said. “The fact that he was the official Labour Party candidate is again a feature which will have led voters to believe that they could trust him and those who worked for him.”
Mr Hussain had set up two mosques in Blackburn, served on the Council of Mosques and the Council for Racial Equality.
www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-1560679,00.html
Yes the government or at least the civil servants should have foreseen the fraud potential in postal voting:
Wednesday May 9, 2001
The Guardian
Vote early, vote often
It may have happened in Florida, but could vote-rigging really happen here? It could and it has, says Nick Davies, thanks to 'granny-farming', the 'Tipp-Ex trick' and a nifty new piece of election legislation
The whole world threw up its hands in horror at the electoral malpractice that was revealed in Florida in the long, harsh climax to last November's US presidential election. As though election-rigging were new. As though election-rigging were some kind of American disease that couldn't happen here.
In truth, it still isn't 100% certain that there was any deliberate rigging in Florida (at least, not before the recounts began). There were polling stations that were closed without warning or simply moved without notice, and they happened to be in predominantly black areas. Some voters were discouraged by a police vehicle-check, which happened to be in a black precinct. Some precincts used unreliable old punch-card machines, and these tended to be in poorer areas - with the result that up to 10% of the votes in black precincts were discarded as spoiled, while less than 3% were discarded in white precincts. Some people with disabilities lost their vote because there were no wheelchair ramps at polling stations. But perhaps this was all simply bungling - which just happened to tend to penalise Democrat voters.
In this country, however, there is no such doubt. Vote-rigging is well established and it is crafted with rat-like cunning. Just about nobody in politics complains about it - because just about everybody in politics knows that his or her own party has been implicated. It is the dirty little secret that they all share: they vote early and they vote often.
Now, in a move that looks at best over-confident and at worst like an invitation to corruption, the electoral rules have been changed, with the effect of increasing the potential for abuse. And, despite a steady trickle of alarming revelations, almost nothing has been done to make it more difficult: every borough is now potentially rotten.
The best and simplest way to procure false votes is to invent false voters - "ghosts", as they are known in the trade. In the 1993 local council elections in Brighton, for example, Labour party workers discovered a cluster of individuals who had been registered to vote at local addresses but who appeared to have left no sign of their existence other than an application for a local Conservative supporter to cast their votes for them.
In the 1998 Hackney council elections, which ended with the jailing of two councillors this month, Lib Dem and Tory riggers registered one of their relatives in two different locations; logged eight fictional voters at the address of a derelict property; and registered more than 80 other ghosts by hijacking the names of students at a residential college, knowing that the students were unlikely to find out, since they were foreign or too young to vote.
The real joy of raising electoral ghosts is that there are no ghostbusters: there is no system for checking the accuracy of the electoral register. Riggers can find a derelict building, or add a couple of extra houses to a street, or use the address of a hostel or anywhere else with a transitory population, and simply bung in names. If they are unlucky or particularly clumsy, and happen to catch the eye of an electoral registration officer, the police may be called. But, under normal circumstances, the paperwork is routinely processed straight on to the register with no attempt at checking.
George Smith, chairman of the Association of Election Administrators, says riggers run a risk of being spotted by opposition workers who really know the area but, "if a registration was false, you wouldn't know. If a form comes in, you treat it at face value, and that's all you can do". When George Howarth, the Labour MP for Knowsley North, chaired a working party on electoral rules in 1999, he reported that the electoral register of 44.2m voters was afflicted by between 4m and 5m omissions and inaccuracies of one kind of another - an error rate of about 10%.
But riggers are at their most inventive when they steal the votes of real people. They do this primarily by abusing the system for postal votes, which allow you to vote at a distance, and for proxy votes, which allow you to nominate somebody else to vote on your behalf. The most popular manoeuvre here is the Tipp-Ex trick: collect applications for postal votes and simply rewrite them as applications for proxy votes, so that party workers can cast the votes themselves. This is rigger heaven.
One of the great unsolved mysteries of modern British politics is the role of the Tipp-Ex trick in John Major's narrow victory over Neil Kinnock in the 1992 general election. The Tory triumph was almost entirely unpredicted: opinion pollsters were forced to eat their figures, the BBC was mauled for the "anti-Tory bias" of its exit polls. At the time, the surprise result was hurriedly explained by the power of Major's soapbox and by the false triumphalism of Kinnock's closing rally in Sheffield.
Complaints about the use of proxy votes emerged from St Ives in Cornwall. In an old people's home called Pine Trees, for example, a Conservative supporter helped 17 elderly electors to fill in a form to apply for a postal vote, and then collected all the forms to take them to the council. Which was fine. Without their knowledge, the 17 elderly voters ended up applying for proxy votes, naming various people who were to vote on their behalf - all of whom turned out to be Conservative partyworkers. Some of these workers expressed astonishment when told the story.
This use of old people to pull off the Tipp-Ex trick is known among riggers as "granny-farming". More than 70 electors in St Ives in 1992 complained that Conservative supporters had used their votes by proxy without their consent. Some old people said they had signed blank forms without knowing what they were. Some said they had signed nothing, including one man who was supposed to have signed a request for a proxy vote without being able to spell his own name. Four were dead by the time they voted.
Managers of the main parties dismiss any suggestion of organised attempts to manipulate proxy voting on a local level. But the really eye-catching fact about the 1992 election is that the entire national result was decided by only 1,241 votes distributed through 11 key marginals. Without those votes in those 11 seats, the Conservatives would have lost the general election. And, in at least three of them - Bolton North East, Stirling and Tynemouth - party workers reported signs of abuse, particularly granny-farming.
Granny-farming is just one variant on the Tipp-Ex trick. Essentially, it relies on canvassers who can legitimately knock on doors and record all those who for one reason or another, will not vote - and who, therefore, will not notice if somebody else votes for them.
Reports of the abuse of absentee votes have bubbled through the system ever since Margaret Thatcher first introduced new rules to encourage overseas voters to cast their ballot by mail. The 1990 local elections saw a Labour councillor in Chorley, a Conservative councillor in West Lancashire and a Liberal agent in Sheffield all separately convicted for forging absentee votes.
Since then, the theft of absentee votes by one means or another has been reported in Brent, Burnley and Brighton, where one Tory canvasser was said to have scored a false proxy by conning a signature out of a blind voter. And it has led to convictions in Enfield, where one of the most senior Tory agents in London, Miles Parker, was fined £750 for forging proxy votes in a local election in 1992; and in Hackney where the riggers conned old people into signing a proxy form by telling them that it was a petition for rubbish collection.
Yet now the government has done something very strange. When Thatcher's boost for postal voting produced this outbreak of abuse, a Home Office working party considered the future of absentee voting, and in February 1994 reported: "Voting in person at the local polling station in general provides the least opportunity for personation or electoral fraud." The working party considered suggestions that absentee votes should be given not simply to those with a specific need but to anyone who asked. However, it concluded: "A move to absent voting on demand might increase the opportunity for fraudulent applications to be made without the knowledge of the elector. On balance, we consider that the risk of increased fraud outweighs the potential advantage for the electorate of making absent voting available to all."
In February, however, the government set aside this warning and went ahead and made absentee voting available to all. Across the country, there has been a surge in applications for postal votes. In areas where the council has advertised the new rules, the surge is huge. In Cardiff, for example, where 2,000 voters were entitled to a postal vote at the last election, 28,000 had applied for a postal vote within five weeks of the new rules being advertised, and new applications were pouring in at the rate of some 500 a day.
After Devon and Cornwall police investigated the St Ives scandal, they recommended that a postal vote should be valid for only a year. But the new postal votes are available for life. The Home Office working party in 1994 recommended that postal votes be confirmed, like a passport application, by an "attestor", such as a doctor, who could vouch for the application. But the new votes are available without attestation; applicants simply sign a declaration of their identity and include one other signature without any form of verification.
There are huge loopholes for the riggers. The new rules allow, for example, for a businessman who is based away from home to apply for a postal vote form to be sent to his work address. But by allowing secondary addresses, the system lets in the rigger: the canvasser identifies an elector who will not vote; the rigger applies for a postal vote in that elector's name and asks for it to be sent, for example, to an address at a block of flats, where it can be collected at the front door; the voter knows nothing, the rigger has his vote. There is no mechanism for detecting the fraud.
The only check on the validity of the hundreds of thousands of new postal voters is that each applicant's name must be on the electoral register. Which is no problem for riggers who steal the votes of real people. And for those who want to raise ghost votes, registration itself has been made much easier, with the introduction of rolling registration, allowing names to be added to the register at any time and via the internet.
The Electoral Reform Society is worried. It wants more postal votes to encourage turnout, but it wants more safeguards. To make the Tipp-Ex trick more difficult, it wants different forms for applying for postal and proxy votes. Ideally, to stop postal applications being converted into proxy forms, it wants proxies to be available only for those living outside the UK. It wants local authorities to have instructions and resources randomly to investigate registrations. "As it is, if you create a ghost voter, you will almost certainly get away with it," a spokesman says.
The government's new rules are based on the inquiry chaired by George Howarth. He wrote his report while police in Hackney were investigating complaints that riggers had created hundreds of ghost voters and "granny-farmed" hundreds of false proxies. Nevertheless, Howarth accepted the conclusion of a home affairs select committee that there was no reason to be seriously concerned about the fairness of British elections. "Public scrutiny of registration remains the single most significant control against abuse," he reported. Which is what they used to say in Florida.
Wednesday May 9, 2001
The Guardian
Vote early, vote often
It may have happened in Florida, but could vote-rigging really happen here? It could and it has, says Nick Davies, thanks to 'granny-farming', the 'Tipp-Ex trick' and a nifty new piece of election legislation
The whole world threw up its hands in horror at the electoral malpractice that was revealed in Florida in the long, harsh climax to last November's US presidential election. As though election-rigging were new. As though election-rigging were some kind of American disease that couldn't happen here.
In truth, it still isn't 100% certain that there was any deliberate rigging in Florida (at least, not before the recounts began). There were polling stations that were closed without warning or simply moved without notice, and they happened to be in predominantly black areas. Some voters were discouraged by a police vehicle-check, which happened to be in a black precinct. Some precincts used unreliable old punch-card machines, and these tended to be in poorer areas - with the result that up to 10% of the votes in black precincts were discarded as spoiled, while less than 3% were discarded in white precincts. Some people with disabilities lost their vote because there were no wheelchair ramps at polling stations. But perhaps this was all simply bungling - which just happened to tend to penalise Democrat voters.
In this country, however, there is no such doubt. Vote-rigging is well established and it is crafted with rat-like cunning. Just about nobody in politics complains about it - because just about everybody in politics knows that his or her own party has been implicated. It is the dirty little secret that they all share: they vote early and they vote often.
Now, in a move that looks at best over-confident and at worst like an invitation to corruption, the electoral rules have been changed, with the effect of increasing the potential for abuse. And, despite a steady trickle of alarming revelations, almost nothing has been done to make it more difficult: every borough is now potentially rotten.
The best and simplest way to procure false votes is to invent false voters - "ghosts", as they are known in the trade. In the 1993 local council elections in Brighton, for example, Labour party workers discovered a cluster of individuals who had been registered to vote at local addresses but who appeared to have left no sign of their existence other than an application for a local Conservative supporter to cast their votes for them.
In the 1998 Hackney council elections, which ended with the jailing of two councillors this month, Lib Dem and Tory riggers registered one of their relatives in two different locations; logged eight fictional voters at the address of a derelict property; and registered more than 80 other ghosts by hijacking the names of students at a residential college, knowing that the students were unlikely to find out, since they were foreign or too young to vote.
The real joy of raising electoral ghosts is that there are no ghostbusters: there is no system for checking the accuracy of the electoral register. Riggers can find a derelict building, or add a couple of extra houses to a street, or use the address of a hostel or anywhere else with a transitory population, and simply bung in names. If they are unlucky or particularly clumsy, and happen to catch the eye of an electoral registration officer, the police may be called. But, under normal circumstances, the paperwork is routinely processed straight on to the register with no attempt at checking.
George Smith, chairman of the Association of Election Administrators, says riggers run a risk of being spotted by opposition workers who really know the area but, "if a registration was false, you wouldn't know. If a form comes in, you treat it at face value, and that's all you can do". When George Howarth, the Labour MP for Knowsley North, chaired a working party on electoral rules in 1999, he reported that the electoral register of 44.2m voters was afflicted by between 4m and 5m omissions and inaccuracies of one kind of another - an error rate of about 10%.
But riggers are at their most inventive when they steal the votes of real people. They do this primarily by abusing the system for postal votes, which allow you to vote at a distance, and for proxy votes, which allow you to nominate somebody else to vote on your behalf. The most popular manoeuvre here is the Tipp-Ex trick: collect applications for postal votes and simply rewrite them as applications for proxy votes, so that party workers can cast the votes themselves. This is rigger heaven.
One of the great unsolved mysteries of modern British politics is the role of the Tipp-Ex trick in John Major's narrow victory over Neil Kinnock in the 1992 general election. The Tory triumph was almost entirely unpredicted: opinion pollsters were forced to eat their figures, the BBC was mauled for the "anti-Tory bias" of its exit polls. At the time, the surprise result was hurriedly explained by the power of Major's soapbox and by the false triumphalism of Kinnock's closing rally in Sheffield.
Complaints about the use of proxy votes emerged from St Ives in Cornwall. In an old people's home called Pine Trees, for example, a Conservative supporter helped 17 elderly electors to fill in a form to apply for a postal vote, and then collected all the forms to take them to the council. Which was fine. Without their knowledge, the 17 elderly voters ended up applying for proxy votes, naming various people who were to vote on their behalf - all of whom turned out to be Conservative partyworkers. Some of these workers expressed astonishment when told the story.
This use of old people to pull off the Tipp-Ex trick is known among riggers as "granny-farming". More than 70 electors in St Ives in 1992 complained that Conservative supporters had used their votes by proxy without their consent. Some old people said they had signed blank forms without knowing what they were. Some said they had signed nothing, including one man who was supposed to have signed a request for a proxy vote without being able to spell his own name. Four were dead by the time they voted.
Managers of the main parties dismiss any suggestion of organised attempts to manipulate proxy voting on a local level. But the really eye-catching fact about the 1992 election is that the entire national result was decided by only 1,241 votes distributed through 11 key marginals. Without those votes in those 11 seats, the Conservatives would have lost the general election. And, in at least three of them - Bolton North East, Stirling and Tynemouth - party workers reported signs of abuse, particularly granny-farming.
Granny-farming is just one variant on the Tipp-Ex trick. Essentially, it relies on canvassers who can legitimately knock on doors and record all those who for one reason or another, will not vote - and who, therefore, will not notice if somebody else votes for them.
Reports of the abuse of absentee votes have bubbled through the system ever since Margaret Thatcher first introduced new rules to encourage overseas voters to cast their ballot by mail. The 1990 local elections saw a Labour councillor in Chorley, a Conservative councillor in West Lancashire and a Liberal agent in Sheffield all separately convicted for forging absentee votes.
Since then, the theft of absentee votes by one means or another has been reported in Brent, Burnley and Brighton, where one Tory canvasser was said to have scored a false proxy by conning a signature out of a blind voter. And it has led to convictions in Enfield, where one of the most senior Tory agents in London, Miles Parker, was fined £750 for forging proxy votes in a local election in 1992; and in Hackney where the riggers conned old people into signing a proxy form by telling them that it was a petition for rubbish collection.
Yet now the government has done something very strange. When Thatcher's boost for postal voting produced this outbreak of abuse, a Home Office working party considered the future of absentee voting, and in February 1994 reported: "Voting in person at the local polling station in general provides the least opportunity for personation or electoral fraud." The working party considered suggestions that absentee votes should be given not simply to those with a specific need but to anyone who asked. However, it concluded: "A move to absent voting on demand might increase the opportunity for fraudulent applications to be made without the knowledge of the elector. On balance, we consider that the risk of increased fraud outweighs the potential advantage for the electorate of making absent voting available to all."
In February, however, the government set aside this warning and went ahead and made absentee voting available to all. Across the country, there has been a surge in applications for postal votes. In areas where the council has advertised the new rules, the surge is huge. In Cardiff, for example, where 2,000 voters were entitled to a postal vote at the last election, 28,000 had applied for a postal vote within five weeks of the new rules being advertised, and new applications were pouring in at the rate of some 500 a day.
After Devon and Cornwall police investigated the St Ives scandal, they recommended that a postal vote should be valid for only a year. But the new postal votes are available for life. The Home Office working party in 1994 recommended that postal votes be confirmed, like a passport application, by an "attestor", such as a doctor, who could vouch for the application. But the new votes are available without attestation; applicants simply sign a declaration of their identity and include one other signature without any form of verification.
There are huge loopholes for the riggers. The new rules allow, for example, for a businessman who is based away from home to apply for a postal vote form to be sent to his work address. But by allowing secondary addresses, the system lets in the rigger: the canvasser identifies an elector who will not vote; the rigger applies for a postal vote in that elector's name and asks for it to be sent, for example, to an address at a block of flats, where it can be collected at the front door; the voter knows nothing, the rigger has his vote. There is no mechanism for detecting the fraud.
The only check on the validity of the hundreds of thousands of new postal voters is that each applicant's name must be on the electoral register. Which is no problem for riggers who steal the votes of real people. And for those who want to raise ghost votes, registration itself has been made much easier, with the introduction of rolling registration, allowing names to be added to the register at any time and via the internet.
The Electoral Reform Society is worried. It wants more postal votes to encourage turnout, but it wants more safeguards. To make the Tipp-Ex trick more difficult, it wants different forms for applying for postal and proxy votes. Ideally, to stop postal applications being converted into proxy forms, it wants proxies to be available only for those living outside the UK. It wants local authorities to have instructions and resources randomly to investigate registrations. "As it is, if you create a ghost voter, you will almost certainly get away with it," a spokesman says.
The government's new rules are based on the inquiry chaired by George Howarth. He wrote his report while police in Hackney were investigating complaints that riggers had created hundreds of ghost voters and "granny-farmed" hundreds of false proxies. Nevertheless, Howarth accepted the conclusion of a home affairs select committee that there was no reason to be seriously concerned about the fairness of British elections. "Public scrutiny of registration remains the single most significant control against abuse," he reported. Which is what they used to say in Florida.
c c said:
Yes the government or at least the civil servants should have foreseen the fraud potential in postal voting:
Wednesday May 9, 2001
The Guardian
Vote early, vote often
It may have happened in Florida, but could vote-rigging really happen here? It could and it has, says Nick Davies, thanks to 'granny-farming', the 'Tipp-Ex trick' and a nifty new piece of election legislation
The whole world threw up its hands in horror at the electoral malpractice that was revealed in Florida in the long, harsh climax to last November's US presidential election. As though election-rigging were new. As though election-rigging were some kind of American disease that couldn't happen here.
In truth, it still isn't 100% certain that there was any deliberate rigging in Florida (at least, not before the recounts began). There were polling stations that were closed without warning or simply moved without notice, and they happened to be in predominantly black areas. Some voters were discouraged by a police vehicle-check, which happened to be in a black precinct. Some precincts used unreliable old punch-card machines, and these tended to be in poorer areas - with the result that up to 10% of the votes in black precincts were discarded as spoiled, while less than 3% were discarded in white precincts. Some people with disabilities lost their vote because there were no wheelchair ramps at polling stations. But perhaps this was all simply bungling - which just happened to tend to penalise Democrat voters.
In this country, however, there is no such doubt. Vote-rigging is well established and it is crafted with rat-like cunning. Just about nobody in politics complains about it - because just about everybody in politics knows that his or her own party has been implicated. It is the dirty little secret that they all share: they vote early and they vote often.
Now, in a move that looks at best over-confident and at worst like an invitation to corruption, the electoral rules have been changed, with the effect of increasing the potential for abuse. And, despite a steady trickle of alarming revelations, almost nothing has been done to make it more difficult: every borough is now potentially rotten.
The best and simplest way to procure false votes is to invent false voters - "ghosts", as they are known in the trade. In the 1993 local council elections in Brighton, for example, Labour party workers discovered a cluster of individuals who had been registered to vote at local addresses but who appeared to have left no sign of their existence other than an application for a local Conservative supporter to cast their votes for them.
In the 1998 Hackney council elections, which ended with the jailing of two councillors this month, Lib Dem and Tory riggers registered one of their relatives in two different locations; logged eight fictional voters at the address of a derelict property; and registered more than 80 other ghosts by hijacking the names of students at a residential college, knowing that the students were unlikely to find out, since they were foreign or too young to vote.
The real joy of raising electoral ghosts is that there are no ghostbusters: there is no system for checking the accuracy of the electoral register. Riggers can find a derelict building, or add a couple of extra houses to a street, or use the address of a hostel or anywhere else with a transitory population, and simply bung in names. If they are unlucky or particularly clumsy, and happen to catch the eye of an electoral registration officer, the police may be called. But, under normal circumstances, the paperwork is routinely processed straight on to the register with no attempt at checking.
George Smith, chairman of the Association of Election Administrators, says riggers run a risk of being spotted by opposition workers who really know the area but, "if a registration was false, you wouldn't know. If a form comes in, you treat it at face value, and that's all you can do". When George Howarth, the Labour MP for Knowsley North, chaired a working party on electoral rules in 1999, he reported that the electoral register of 44.2m voters was afflicted by between 4m and 5m omissions and inaccuracies of one kind of another - an error rate of about 10%.
But riggers are at their most inventive when they steal the votes of real people. They do this primarily by abusing the system for postal votes, which allow you to vote at a distance, and for proxy votes, which allow you to nominate somebody else to vote on your behalf. The most popular manoeuvre here is the Tipp-Ex trick: collect applications for postal votes and simply rewrite them as applications for proxy votes, so that party workers can cast the votes themselves. This is rigger heaven.
One of the great unsolved mysteries of modern British politics is the role of the Tipp-Ex trick in John Major's narrow victory over Neil Kinnock in the 1992 general election. The Tory triumph was almost entirely unpredicted: opinion pollsters were forced to eat their figures, the BBC was mauled for the "anti-Tory bias" of its exit polls. At the time, the surprise result was hurriedly explained by the power of Major's soapbox and by the false triumphalism of Kinnock's closing rally in Sheffield.
Complaints about the use of proxy votes emerged from St Ives in Cornwall. In an old people's home called Pine Trees, for example, a Conservative supporter helped 17 elderly electors to fill in a form to apply for a postal vote, and then collected all the forms to take them to the council. Which was fine. Without their knowledge, the 17 elderly voters ended up applying for proxy votes, naming various people who were to vote on their behalf - all of whom turned out to be Conservative partyworkers. Some of these workers expressed astonishment when told the story.
This use of old people to pull off the Tipp-Ex trick is known among riggers as "granny-farming". More than 70 electors in St Ives in 1992 complained that Conservative supporters had used their votes by proxy without their consent. Some old people said they had signed blank forms without knowing what they were. Some said they had signed nothing, including one man who was supposed to have signed a request for a proxy vote without being able to spell his own name. Four were dead by the time they voted.
Managers of the main parties dismiss any suggestion of organised attempts to manipulate proxy voting on a local level. But the really eye-catching fact about the 1992 election is that the entire national result was decided by only 1,241 votes distributed through 11 key marginals. Without those votes in those 11 seats, the Conservatives would have lost the general election. And, in at least three of them - Bolton North East, Stirling and Tynemouth - party workers reported signs of abuse, particularly granny-farming.
Granny-farming is just one variant on the Tipp-Ex trick. Essentially, it relies on canvassers who can legitimately knock on doors and record all those who for one reason or another, will not vote - and who, therefore, will not notice if somebody else votes for them.
Reports of the abuse of absentee votes have bubbled through the system ever since Margaret Thatcher first introduced new rules to encourage overseas voters to cast their ballot by mail. The 1990 local elections saw a Labour councillor in Chorley, a Conservative councillor in West Lancashire and a Liberal agent in Sheffield all separately convicted for forging absentee votes.
Since then, the theft of absentee votes by one means or another has been reported in Brent, Burnley and Brighton, where one Tory canvasser was said to have scored a false proxy by conning a signature out of a blind voter. And it has led to convictions in Enfield, where one of the most senior Tory agents in London, Miles Parker, was fined £750 for forging proxy votes in a local election in 1992; and in Hackney where the riggers conned old people into signing a proxy form by telling them that it was a petition for rubbish collection.
Yet now the government has done something very strange. When Thatcher's boost for postal voting produced this outbreak of abuse, a Home Office working party considered the future of absentee voting, and in February 1994 reported: "Voting in person at the local polling station in general provides the least opportunity for personation or electoral fraud." The working party considered suggestions that absentee votes should be given not simply to those with a specific need but to anyone who asked. However, it concluded: "A move to absent voting on demand might increase the opportunity for fraudulent applications to be made without the knowledge of the elector. On balance, we consider that the risk of increased fraud outweighs the potential advantage for the electorate of making absent voting available to all."
In February, however, the government set aside this warning and went ahead and made absentee voting available to all. Across the country, there has been a surge in applications for postal votes. In areas where the council has advertised the new rules, the surge is huge. In Cardiff, for example, where 2,000 voters were entitled to a postal vote at the last election, 28,000 had applied for a postal vote within five weeks of the new rules being advertised, and new applications were pouring in at the rate of some 500 a day.
After Devon and Cornwall police investigated the St Ives scandal, they recommended that a postal vote should be valid for only a year. But the new postal votes are available for life. The Home Office working party in 1994 recommended that postal votes be confirmed, like a passport application, by an "attestor", such as a doctor, who could vouch for the application. But the new votes are available without attestation; applicants simply sign a declaration of their identity and include one other signature without any form of verification.
There are huge loopholes for the riggers. The new rules allow, for example, for a businessman who is based away from home to apply for a postal vote form to be sent to his work address. But by allowing secondary addresses, the system lets in the rigger: the canvasser identifies an elector who will not vote; the rigger applies for a postal vote in that elector's name and asks for it to be sent, for example, to an address at a block of flats, where it can be collected at the front door; the voter knows nothing, the rigger has his vote. There is no mechanism for detecting the fraud.
The only check on the validity of the hundreds of thousands of new postal voters is that each applicant's name must be on the electoral register. Which is no problem for riggers who steal the votes of real people. And for those who want to raise ghost votes, registration itself has been made much easier, with the introduction of rolling registration, allowing names to be added to the register at any time and via the internet.
The Electoral Reform Society is worried. It wants more postal votes to encourage turnout, but it wants more safeguards. To make the Tipp-Ex trick more difficult, it wants different forms for applying for postal and proxy votes. Ideally, to stop postal applications being converted into proxy forms, it wants proxies to be available only for those living outside the UK. It wants local authorities to have instructions and resources randomly to investigate registrations. "As it is, if you create a ghost voter, you will almost certainly get away with it," a spokesman says.
The government's new rules are based on the inquiry chaired by George Howarth. He wrote his report while police in Hackney were investigating complaints that riggers had created hundreds of ghost voters and "granny-farmed" hundreds of false proxies. Nevertheless, Howarth accepted the conclusion of a home affairs select committee that there was no reason to be seriously concerned about the fairness of British elections. "Public scrutiny of registration remains the single most significant control against abuse," he reported. Which is what they used to say in Florida.
There was never any conclusive proof of ballot abuse in 1992 - it was just the embittered figment of the imaginations of a bunch of unreconstituted communists.
There is conclusive proof of ballot abuse in current campaigns and it is all being perpetrated by Labour councillors, under the backdrop of a Labour government turning a blind eye. Postal voting should be shelved completely until effective checks and measures are put in place.
This whole disgraceful story, which I have followed for a while, just goes to show how democracy is so precious it needs to be guarded carefully.
Sadly it also highlights how corruption is rife amongst other countries and cultures, and as a problem it needs to be tackled head-on without fear of shouts of "Racism" or crippling PC-Ness.....
IMHO.
Sadly it also highlights how corruption is rife amongst other countries and cultures, and as a problem it needs to be tackled head-on without fear of shouts of "Racism" or crippling PC-Ness.....
IMHO.
Mon Ami Mate said:
There was never any conclusive proof of ballot abuse in 1992 - it was just the embittered figment of the imaginations of a bunch of unreconstituted communists.
Oh wake up and smell the bleeding coffee man, it's been going on for years and all parties are guilty of it.
anonymous said:
[redacted]
AlexKP - WELL DONE! This is one of the most sensible things ever written on the subject of racism. In some cultures it is quite normal and accepted to lie to get what you want, or to bribe officials, or physically assault people you don't like. Look at the degree of corruption in places like Somalia, Bangladesh and Nigeria (all three vie for bottom place on the list of most corrupt countries in the world.) Trowing acid on illegal children is usual. "Honour Killings" are a part of life. Violence, muggings, murder are normal. Elections are a joke, and a poor one at that.
And people who live in these cultures become used to it - it is normal for them. So, when they import this culture to the UK, this will continue. Standards of behaviour will be low, by British standards.
No, this is not racist. It may be culturalist, but is not racist. Anyone who claims otherwise has missed the point.
AlexKP - you have hit the nail on the head.
Oli.
zcacogp said:
AlexKP - WELL DONE! This is one of the most sensible things ever written on the subject of racism.
In some cultures it is quite normal and accepted to lie to get what you want, or to bribe officials, or physically assault people you don't like. Look at the degree of corruption in places like Somalia, Bangladesh and Nigeria (all three vie for bottom place on the list of most corrupt countries in the world.) Trowing acid on illegal children is usual. "Honour Killings" are a part of life. Violence, muggings, murder are normal. Elections are a joke, and a poor one at that.
And people who live in these cultures become used to it - it is normal for them. So, when they import this culture to the UK, this will continue. Standards of behaviour will be low, by British standards.
No, this is not racist. It may be culturalist, but is not racist. Anyone who claims otherwise has missed the point.
AlexKP - you have hit the nail on the head.
Oli.
Thanks, and may I add that you have expounded the problem clearly.
It is a cultural issue - not a racial one.
I genuinely think that the perpetrators of this fraud simply saw a weakness and chose to exploit it exactly as they would have done in their country of origin.
The general cultural attitude is one of "I am corrupt, it is your problem if you let me get away with it."
anonymous said:
[redacted]
I did, and often do... but Lost Angels, 968 (the ethnic spokesperson), and the usual pious subjects usually accuse me of being 'racist' (whatever that is...)
www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?p=3&f=141&t=168176&h=0
Tuesday 5th April
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[quote]los angeles said: The title of this thread is misleading; it ought to say, Local councillors found guilty of election fraud. From my perspective, it looks another "ethnic minority" issue, the bigger question being, how safe are postal votes from fraud? [/quote]
Dr Strangelove said:
[quote]If those 3's exploits are anything to go by, the sky's the limit..., and yes, it's quite possible that this could also be an issue for the 'ethnic minorities', after all are they not the very people that our 3 'democratic champions' represent?, and who were almost certainly voted for on that platform. And what do they do in the land of mother parliment, they treat it just like home... [/quote]
>> Edited by Dr Strangelove on Monday 11th April 13:43
anonymous said:
[redacted]
Well there's a question. Hardly law of averages is it? Or are we supposed to be muted under the racism card? As usual you manage to throw a smouldering firework back into the box and leave before the show
In this case, the minority were trying to vote themselves in fraudulently and they got caught this time.
But what about next time and what happens if the government fails to wake up and take action? What happens to the country when there are enough of the minority turning the wheels of power?
I am certainly concerned and if you lot aren't then you should be.
ultimasimon said:
But what about next time and what happens if the government fails to wake up and take action? What happens to the country when there are enough of the minority turning the wheels of power?
That day will eventually come, sooner than you think, and when it does, It will cease to be a nation, even less a united one. Our political masters do not have a solution to this looming problem, for they have never given it a serious thought, 'cept to suggest that have more jam today... Our major cities are being turned into ethnic minority 'cities of culture' By 2010 ethnic minorities in some of Britain's major cities will be in the majority. Then we will see what the 'ethnic' agenda is, apart from 'cleaning jobs and propping up the NHS' (for which I am humbly grateful)...
We will increasingly see the American phenomenon known as white flight.
This is already happening in London Where the British born proportion of the population is plummeting. I saw some figures on the subject which were dramatic-if anyone is interested I will try and track them down on the Economist website.
At present this trend is restrained by the need to get to jobs in the cities, but the signs are there-Bournemouth and Poole now have a thriving financial services industry. If more jobs migrate to the regions and more people work from home-we could well see an American situation-The cities abandoned to ethnic minorities and the poor.
This is already happening in London Where the British born proportion of the population is plummeting. I saw some figures on the subject which were dramatic-if anyone is interested I will try and track them down on the Economist website.
At present this trend is restrained by the need to get to jobs in the cities, but the signs are there-Bournemouth and Poole now have a thriving financial services industry. If more jobs migrate to the regions and more people work from home-we could well see an American situation-The cities abandoned to ethnic minorities and the poor.
JagLover said:
This is already happening in London Where the British born proportion of the population is plummeting.
I think you mean the “white” British born population is plummeting. A significant proportion of the “ethnic minorities” were actually born in Britain.
Not that I’m disagreeing with you mind. I agree with most of what’s been said above I just don’t have much to add of relevance that’s not been said already. Enoch Powell’s speech is ringing in my ears ATM though.
I’m just waiting for 968 and peterpeter to come galloping in on their high horses for the fireworks to really start
einion yrth said:
There was never any conclusive proof of ballot abuse in 1992 - it was just the embittered figment of the imaginations of a bunch of unreconstituted communists.
Oh wake up and smell the bleeding coffee man, it's been going on for years and all parties are guilty of it.
Rubbish. If a Conservative had been caught doing this it would be all over the BBC and the tabloids would be falling over themselves to cry "sleaze".
JagLover said:
We will increasingly see the American phenomenon known as white flight.
This is already happening in London Where the British born proportion of the population is plummeting. I saw some figures on the subject which were dramatic-if anyone is interested I will try and track them down on the Economist website.
At present this trend is restrained by the need to get to jobs in the cities, but the signs are there-Bournemouth and Poole now have a thriving financial services industry. If more jobs migrate to the regions and more people work from home-we could well see an American situation-The cities abandoned to ethnic minorities and the poor.
I have already mentioned this on the London thread today. The only thing keeping the house prices high in london is the high paying city jobs. It seems that the silent majority are beginning to wakeup to what will happen if these people ever became a majority. That will never happen in reality because we would have another balkans on our hands if it ever did.
Hardcore2000 said:
We will increasingly see the American phenomenon known as white flight.
This is already happening in London Where the British born proportion of the population is plummeting. I saw some figures on the subject which were dramatic-if anyone is interested I will try and track them down on the Economist website.
At present this trend is restrained by the need to get to jobs in the cities, but the signs are there-Bournemouth and Poole now have a thriving financial services industry. If more jobs migrate to the regions and more people work from home-we could well see an American situation-The cities abandoned to ethnic minorities and the poor.
I have already mentioned this on the London thread today. The only thing keeping the house prices high in london is the high paying city jobs. It seems that the silent majority are beginning to wakeup to what will happen if these people ever became a majority. That will never happen in reality because we would have another balkans on our hands if it ever did.
In London maybe but on the outskirts I would have to disagree. It is fast beoming territorial areas. In my area the only thing keeping the house prices up is the vast invasion of the Indian population from the overspill from Southall into Hayes, causing the house prices to be artificialy sustained as the new culture tries to live next to their breathren. Ten years ago there were about 2 houses down the street that were owned by Indian famillies now it is the opposite as more an more are moving away from the area. Local people move in groups now and even I don't feel comfortable walking the streets at night in this area, and I am pretty bullet-proof. Where as it was common place to say hello or good afternoon when you came across someone, now people just look at the floor and pretend your not there.
20 years ago Harlington was a clean local town. Today it is a dump with cheap food shops and rubbish everywhere, with people spitting on the ground and drunks drinking from paper bags on the park benches. I have watched the culture change with horror as different standards have been introduced.
As for all this talk of integration, what is that? I am yet to see one Indian in business with an Englishman and there are hundreds of business opportunities around here.
Next year when my mortgage contract becomes flexible I will be off to another area. Sorry for all the doom and gloom, but that is exactly how it is where I live at the moment. In my town the exodus has already begun.
Gassing Station | The Pie & Piston Archive | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff