Rotten Boroughs - An Occasional Series on Electoral Fraud
The recent difficulties Labour are having in Erith and Thamesmead contain the seeds of what is wrong with the electoral system in this country. Belated Blair’s Babe Georgia Gould is allegedly being rigged in, in what is to my mind the last gasp of Blairism rearing its ugly head in this country. (I can’t believe Brown actually wants more Babes in the wood-panelled tea-rooms.) Furthermore, the allegations are inextricably linked with the wider way in which we vote in this country, and with the dreaded system of postal voting.
I campaigned very hard at the general election of 2005 for the Conservatives, and we in Reading had our own mini-crime wave of fraudulent postal voting. The outgoing Labour MP, deselected Jane Griffiths, refused to acknowledge the Labour councillors accused of manipulation of the postal voting system, and denounced her own party in her Commons’ swan-song. At one point she was rumoured to have crossed the floor to the Tories, round about the same time I made that decision, though this proved to be false. Griffiths will be sadly missed as an independent voice in the Commons.
Prior to 2001, the only people who could vote by post were those who could demonstrate that they would be absent from their place of residence on polling day itself. Subsequent to New Labour’s attempt to increase turnout, people have been permitted to apply for a postal vote without having to prove that they will be AWOL on that particular Thursday. In some areas – before it was mercifully sat upon by the Electoral Commission – all-postal voting was trialled at local elections, most notably in the contest for the mayoralty of Hartlepool.
By the 2005 general election this way of voting was quite a significant factor. During my four months campaigning in Reading, Wokingham and Newbury, each party sent out forms for people to fill in and return to the council to make sure they got their vote in early. In our case, leaflets were sent out to every firm Conservative supporter urging them to apply for a postal vote, and although Michael Howard said that if he was elected Prime Minister he would reform the system back to what it was before the 2001 deluge, he had no particular objection to the party using – but not abusing – the system to “farm” votes in this way.
There are some flaws to this system which have not been analysed properly by the media. Basically what happens is that activists distribute forms to the public but these forms are not returned to the party offices, they are sent direct to the council, thereby not involving the activists any further, there is still the issue of what happens to the votes themselves once they are sent in to the council overseeing the election. In our case, this was Reading Borough Council. Representatives of all candidates are invited to the opening of the postal votes, which takes place after the deadline for the votes to come in – which in our case was almost a week before May 5’s actual poll. This process is like shelling nuts; the votes are contained within an envelope which also has certification and witnessing documents to make sure it really is one person, one vote. These are removed, validated and filed away somewhere.
The votes are, however, visible to those attending this event, allowing activists to take a reading as to what the projected result could be. Our activist recorded that, roughly speaking, 45% of postal votes were going to the Conservatives, 30% to Labour and 20% to the Liberal Democrats. This is a highly marginal seat we are talking about. Reading East is like a cross-section of the entire country – it may be a prosperous south-eastern English town, but Whitley Wood, south of the main town centre, sandwiched between House of Fraser and Junction 11 of the M4, is one of the most deprived areas of the country. As a recent and rather guilty convert to Conservatism, which at one point cost me a long-standing relationship which was on the verge of a marriage proposal, I was surprised and delighted to find us delivering rather a lot of Vote Conservative flyers – the ones sent to pledged voters a day or two before the election to remind them to turn out – to the sort of estates you find featured on Shameless. This is also a seat where in previous elections the proportion of Conservative, Labour and Liberal votes was roughly in line with national figures. So it is not a seat likely to have shown a high proportion of Conservative votes without a corresponding national swing to the Blues.
What I am really trying to say is Michael Howard, he of the owlish glasses and curiously accented voice, should be Prime Minister.
Yes, you read that right. Michael Howard, up until so close to the election, was actually polling the margins his successor now enjoys in the polls, even if only on paper. At the proportions specified, Wilson’s majority should be of the order of 6,000, on a turnout equal to that officially recorded.
So what happened within the last four or five days of the election campaign for Labour to whittle a huge 15% deficit down to a single 1% gap between Labour’s candidate Reading Buses chairman Tony Page, who had a conviction for behaving embarrassingly in a public lavatory, and former mobile phone businessman and current Conservative MP Rob Wilson? Labour would have needed to pull out all the stops to save themselves from a massive defeat, both locally and nationally, and Howard would have needed to have been found with a Sent Items cache of emails documenting Tony Blair’s embarrassing diseases, to pull back that kind of a margin. Even if we are talking less rounded figures, the difference between 15% and 1% is not possible to make up in a single week when the man in the next constituency, Martin Salter, is so afraid of losing his own seat he is pulling valuable Labour activists back into Reading West.
These issues cannot be ignored, because they are not the province of party activists, the discrepancy lies between opening the votes and counting them – and is thus the responsibility of the local authorities who are charged with dispensing electoral security. If activists know who has voted how and in what proportions, then so do those charged with looking after these votes between opening and count.
In 2004, a Birmingham official was sacked from their electoral services department when 1,000 uncounted postal votes were discovered on his watch. Now, it might be charitable here to suggest that these uncounted votes were directly in proportion to how the eventual result turned out – even before the rest were counted. However, that is probably not the case. More likely, our man in Reading had seen exactly the same statistics as our activist had, and decided that perhaps that margin of 15% to the Conservatives would just not do, and had tidied a certain number of those Conservative postal votes into a pile and perhaps just forgot to put them into the pool on election night for counting. Poor people – they don’t know the Conservatives aren’t supposed to win nationally, though perhaps the donkey with the convictions for cottaging might not be a good candidate to join Labour in the House, so let’s ensure that the Tory gets in with a small majority – not more than, say, 475 – and so the rest of those votes get “mislaid”. By the time they turn up, no-one’s interested, the old guy with the irritating voice has been replaced by a younger, brighter and tamer successor, and it’s OK again to let the Conservatives have a day or three in the sun, maybe even let them win next time so Labour don’t get too uppity. No-one, in short, cares two hoots what happened four years ago.
But the thought that we might have and continue to have the wrong government because of that is far too depressing to contemplate.
