Scottish Parliament (Elections etc.) (Amendment) Order 2008

My Lords, on behalf of these Benches I, too, welcome the order and the regulations. They appear to stem from discussions that were held in your Lordships’ House during the passage of the Electoral Administration Bill in 2006, when provisions were inserted to require absent voters to provide personal identifiers to electoral registration officers. I have no quarrel at all with the timing of these instruments and I agree with what the Minister said about the sense of bringing them before us now. The order sets out the process by which personal identifiers are to be collected and how they will be used to check the validity of returned postal votes. It is surely right—we have always taken this view—that we should make it easier for electors with a disability or the inability to read and write and that they should be exempt from providing personal identifiers. The transitional arrangements, which the Minister described in detail, seem entirely sensible. The regulations implement a change removing the standing fee of £5 and having the fee calculated on the basis of the price of copied returns at the rate of 20p for each side of each page. That is a perfectly defensible proposal. During the passage of the Electoral Administration Bill, my noble friends and my honourable friends in another place supported what is being implemented tonight. It is right to encourage new methods of voting, including more postal votes and internet voting, since the participation of the electorate in voting is crucial to the health of our democracy. It has been noted that all-postal ballots in local and European elections helped to increase voter turnout. There are certainly dangers of electoral fraud. It is good to hear from the Minister that so far those dangers are not running ahead unchecked, but it is right to be prudent in seeking to avoid them. Problems of personation, multiple voting and intimidation may, as the noble Duke suggested, be observed in wild countries. I hazard the suggestion that within the British Isles such practices are not historically unknown, though they may have happened in slightly less ruly parts of the country than noble Lords are familiar with today. Having said that and having strongly welcomed these prudent measures, I think that it is right to encourage voting in person, as that is an act of civic participation that gives a higher profile to the importance of the ballot in our democracy. Therefore, while I am happy to endorse the changes that ensure that people who are unable to vote in person because they are ill or away from home are able to vote by post, I hope that we may look at measures that will make it easier for people to vote in person, including certain changes in the days on which people vote. The date—weekend voting and all that—is probably of greater significance than the matters that we are considering tonight. However, it is right to ensure that our elections are secure and to combat electoral fraud, and these instruments seek to do that.