Political Parties and Elections Bill

That is even better news. I cannot imagine that people in some of the more hard-headed parts of Lancashire would buy them without being given the money. Yesterday I asked the senior election officer in Pendle, the lady who runs the office, what the experience was in Pendle. Off its own bat, Pendle has been checking 100 per cent of returned postal votes, or at least certainly since last year in view of the allegations and problems there have been in our borough. She commented that, while it takes time and resources, it can be done. It is a matter of getting organised. The process is slower but the machines themselves are getting faster. The software goes into the computer, the signatures are scanned, information on the date of birth is fed in, and then the pieces of paper that people put their signature and date of birth on are fed into the computer system. The computer checks them and decides whether they match or not. When they do not match, a warning is thrown up on the screen and someone has to physically compare the piece of paper that people signed when they registered for a postal vote with what comes up on the screen. The process takes time and resources, but it is possible to do and it works quite well. Only five weeks ago I attended a count during a town council by-election and watched the process. It seemed to work quite efficiently. From a practical point of view, I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Henley, that if it works in our part of the world, it will work everywhere else. The other interesting thing, however, is that the system is resulting in votes being rejected. When the computer finds that there is not a match, someone looks at it and decides whether the signature and the date of birth match and a proportion are rejected. Again, that is a downside of the system. For whatever reason, the proportion of postal votes rejected is quite high. We had two town council by-elections five weeks ago. In one case, where there were not so many postal votes, only 5 per cent were rejected. In the second ward, over half the votes cast were postal votes and people had been actively signing people up for them. We did not have a candidate in this by-election, so noble Lords cannot point fingers at our party. In that case, approximately 10 per cent of the postal votes that were returned were rejected as a result of 100 per cent checking. So 100 per cent checking is weeding out illegitimate votes on quite a substantial scale in at least these areas. The question is whether that is a deterrent to people not to do it in future. Because of the nature of the thing, the people whose votes are being rejected do not know that they have been rejected. However, from a practical point of view, 100 per cent checking can happen. It ought to happen and I very much support the Conservative amendment.