Electoral Administration Bill

This is a very important part of the Bill, as other Members of the Committee have said. It is either the path to the future, setting out the system that we will have pretty well everywhere, perhaps in 10 years’ time; or it will turn out that it does not work and the later clause that provides for the repeal of this provision will be used and that will be that. Nevertheless, it is a turning point in one way or another. I have two amendments in this large group, Amendments Nos. 91A and 91B, which seek to add the question of proxy voting and proxy voters to some of the amendments of my noble friend Lord Rennard; I will come to them in a minute. In general, I support my noble friend’s amendments, which are probably the right way forward. Unlike the Electoral Commission and my own party, I do not think that we could, at this stage, safely and sensibly move towards a system of personal identifiers for the whole country at the same time. Without going into details, it would not work very well. A transitional scheme applied to postal voters is a means both of testing personal identifiers and of cutting down on the opportunities for postal vote fraud. On that basis, I support what my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Elder, and others, have said. It is important to understand—and it is not generally understood in the political community, although it may be by those here—that there is a difference between personal identifiers and individual registration. They are two separate concepts. They could be introduced together, but they do not have to be. It would be difficult to have a system of personal identifiers without some individual registration, but it would be perfectly possible to have a system of individual registration with no personal identifiers at all. This is the sort of discussion we were having some amendments ago about who is responsible for providing the information that goes on the electoral register, where electoral registration officers look for it and so on. It is important to keep the fact that they are two separate things in our mind, because the Government are proposing, it seems to me, something of a hybrid system in many ways. They are proposing personal identifiers—to be piloted and perhaps rolled out—but are not proposing individual registration. As such, they are proposing a continuation of household registration, with an individual element. People will be required to sign their name with one of their 15 different signatures on the form, but the form will continue to be a household form for most people. Yet people will then be able to apply individually through rolling registration or some other system. I am not at all sure that that is the way to go. I would prefer pure, individual registration, where it is the individual’s responsibility to get themselves registered. That is an argument for another day; it is not what is proposed. Providing signatures will not prevent postal vote fraud, nor will it solve some of the crucial underlying problems. It will deter people, and make it more difficult to organise widespread fraud—there is no doubt about that. However, people will still be able to go door to door, collecting the postal votes as they arrive, as I have personally observed in Pendle—““following the postman”” is the technical term—and getting the voters to sign the declaration of identity, which would be a requirement to sign under the new system, but taking away the vote and filling it in outside. In some parts of the country that takes place on a frequent basis. How widespread it is, is a matter for discussion. Some noble Lords may have seen an item on ““Newsnight”” at the last general election, when Michael Crick was interviewing a 17-year-old lad who I had introduced to him on the streets of Nelson, who quite openly, with his family, said ““Yes, I voted for my parents; I filled in their ballot papers. So-and-so from such-and-such a party came and took them away””. That will still be possible under this system, although the signatures will be required. The important thing is not that every signature will be checked as the postal votes come in; it is that they are there to be looked at and checked if there is a challenge to a particular election. I accept entirely that the bank no longer checks every signature on every cheque—we used to get them sent back to us in little packets a long time ago—so that is not going to happen. Unless somebody provides local authorities and local registration officers with quite extraordinary modern technology, so that they can all be checked as they come in—which I do not think is proposed at this stage—it is not going to happen. If there is a challenge after the election, whoever is entitled to look at these things will be able to do so and make comparisons. If there are doubts about what is going on somewhere, either because people see that odd things are going on, with large piles of postal votes coming in together, or, if information from the community says that something is going on, they will be able to check it at the time. So that will be a deterrent and it will be helpful, but it will not stop the basic problem with postal votes, which is that you can never guarantee that the person who owns the vote has filled in the ballot paper. You can never guarantee that with postal votes; that is why, if what is proposed by my noble friend reduces the number of people who vote by post and increases the number who go to polling stations, I would not be sorry about that. I think that postal voting on demand is inherently insecure, open to fraud and should be stopped, but that is not what we are discussing. Finally, I want to speak to my amendments to my noble friend’s amendment, which introduce the question of proxy votes. The amount of proxy fraud going on now may not be so great, but a few years ago, quite a lot was going on—certainly in my part of Lancashire. In one by-election in a different ward in Nelson, at eight o’clock in the morning, when the polling stations opened, there was a queue of 250 people in the street outside. Half of those people had proxy votes and the other half were people who were trying to get to the polling station before their proxy because they claimed that their vote had been stolen from them and given to a proxy. I am glad to say that I was not involved in that election, except as an observer, but it was frightening. I will not tell you who won either. So there are potential problems with proxy votes and, if we are to have a more secure system for postal voting with signatures, the person who is appointed as a proxy should sign an acceptance—not all have to sign at present; you can sign for a proxy but they do not have to sign their acceptance—and then they should have to sign when they get to the polling station. That is the purpose of Amendments Nos. 91A and B.