I wrote this article as a non-technical explanation of my research spurred on by the 45 Percenters issue and a subsequent exploration into whether I could see any anomalies at the wider level than just Reading East. Unfortunately I don't know how to upload a graph or Excel file to the web - if anyone can help, please email me on louise.stanley@live.co.uk.
Election results show alarming trend
Louise Stanley, (published to web 10 May 2009)
Council of Europe document here: http://assembly.coe.int/main.asp?Link=/documents/workingdocs/doc06/edoc10993.htm
Research compiled over the last few years indicates that electoral results since 1992 have been distorted in favour of “round” results. In response to concerns arising from a European Council report of June 2006, it has been demonstrated that British general election results have been manipulated over a period of 17 years. The report, dated June 2006 which provided a list of issues that needed attention within the voting system as a whole. This report included postal voting problems, but was not limited to manipulation of the postal voting system by party representatives – it also dealt with abuses and mishandling by the civil administration itself after uncounted votes were discovered in Birmingham in 2004 in the run-up to the local and European elections on June 10 that year.
Figures compiled by a Berkshire researcher, currently an independent political observer, and, over the last twelve years a member of both major political parties, showed consistent year-on-year trend towards more constituencies returning results which end in a 5 or a 0. Data was taken from the site http://www.electiondemon.co.uk which provides raw election results for all elections and by-elections since 1983.
In the period in which Labour has been winning or expecting to win general elections, the results have shown a “notable trend” towards candidates of all parties, including fringe nominees, attaining “round number results”, and the number of constituencies in which these results occur has risen from election to election. Observations of local results within the Reading area – in both Reading East and Reading West constituencies – led to a survey of raw election data in an attempt to find out whether patterns noted during the 2005 election could have been repeated on a national scale. The survey did not distinguish between postal ballots and hand-cast votes, and instead focussed on trends within the published election results themselves. The current postal voting system did not exist in its current form prior to the 2001 general election (although all-postal pilots were conducted at the 2000 local elections, these results are not under scrutiny here), and cannot be considered as a major factor in any fraud allegations in previous elections.
The percentage of “clean” constituencies – constituencies where there were no results ending in a 5 or a 0 – fell from a high of 44.95% in 1987 to 22.96% in 2005, over Great Britain and Northern Ireland as a whole. Regional results for England in 2005 were concentrated in the region of 22.9%, whereas in previous years more variable results were obtained, even as part of the downward trend.
The researcher is satisfied that these results are not symptomatic of any social or economic conditions prevailing over the 25 years in question, and the only notable cause of the distortion is, arguably, a qualitative rise in media and apparent public support (through opinion poll surveys) for the Labour Party between 1992 and 2005. The number of results ending in 5 or 0 is similar from election to election in terms of a percentage of all results over the 25-year period in question, but in terms of the distribution of these results across the constituencies and regions, there is a marked fall in the number of constituencies where such results were not returned. Furthermore, the number of candidates peaked in 1997 and has fallen since, ruling out any correlation between rise in candidate numbers and an increase in frequency of round number results. Since the number of people voting is variable, then each candidate’s result is also as equally likely as another to end in a 5 or 0 and therefore each result even within a constituency can be treated as a discrete event.
A stark example is shown by the 2001 result returned for Witney, where the Liberal Democrat candidate obtained an exact 10,000 votes. This result is within expected statistical probabilities, as provided by the researcher’s first table showing the frequency of round number results in terms of single candidates rather than their distribution across constituencies (the subject of the second table) but highlights the degree to which manipulation might be being hidden by the civil administration between polling station and count.
The Council of Europe report of June 2006 provided circumstantial evidence of tampering and manipulation of results during the 2005 election. It revealed “25 allegations of electoral fraud in 19 parliamentary constituencies” of vote-rigging within local authorities’ electoral services in addition to partisan manipulation of the postal vote system which has over the past 9 years been examined by the press in great detail. Both Labour and Conservative parties have been accused of fraudulent manipulation of postal voting in the past but official statistics betray a worrying trend even allowing for the activities of known fraudsters. The nature of the variable studied suggests, moreover, that actual engineering of the results took place rather than mere attempts to over-represent the partisan vote, suggesting that civil authorities throughout the United Kingdom were actively tampering with the results prior to the count. Statistics for general elections were compiled without reference to locality or presiding authority; the analysis focussed on establishing a national trend rather than confining scrutiny to one particular local authority or regional establishment.
The research, summarised in the Reading Evening Post in late November (article not available online), was submitted to the Electoral Commission, who are currently investigating the trends.
The research raises significant questions over the legitimacy of the current government and of governments since 1992, as well as for the security of the coming general election. It is alleged that this manipulation has benefitted Labour rather than the Conservatives, since the period in which the manipulation has taken place has been exactly parallel with the period in which the Labour Party has been predominant in published opinion polling and official surveys, though no specific allegation is levelled at the Labour Party itself. However, significant change in the dominant party in the media could also mean that the civil administration manipulates results in favour of published “public opinion” where no such desire for a change of government exists on the ground; the country is in danger of being run from Fleet Street rather than Westminster.
