Political Parties and Elections Bill

This is a distinctly Back-Bench amendment. I will be interested to know what my Front-Bench colleagues think about it. It would introduce a new clause amending Schedule 4 to the Representation of the People Act 2000.The aim is to return the postal voting system, in general terms, to that which existed before 2000 by putting postal and proxy votes on the same basis. The Minister may tell me that the amendment is not exactly right in purely technical terms. I do not know if it is or not; I have done my best. Clearly, it has been tabled to instigate a general debate on postal voting and is similar in intention, although not at all in wording, to an amendment tabled in the House of Commons by Mr Douglas Hogg which was unfortunately not debated. In simple terms, the amendment would abolish postal voting on demand. If I had more time to consider matters carefully, I would want to restrict postal voting further than that. I hope that the country will look seriously at advanced voting systems as an alternative to postal voting, of the kind that we discovered to our surprise are pretty widespread in the United States, which restricts postal voting to grounds of infirmity and illness. However, that is not what the amendment would do. It would abolish postal voting on demand, which was introduced in 2000 with the best of intentions. It has proved to be a system that is wide open to electoral fraud, corruption and fiddling, and is a thoroughly bad thing. In the previous debate but one, the Minister talked about the importance of the "convenience" of voting. I am interested that he is still using that word because it was almost predominant when we were talking about the old postal voting pilots that the Government used when were talking about the then Electoral Administration Bill in 2006, when I was ploughing the same furrow. They talked about convenience and increasing turnout. Unfortunately, there are unintended consequences, many of which I believe are unavoidable. I was looking back through the huge piles of material on postal voting that I have received over the past few years, and I again picked up the Electoral Commission’s report of August 2004, following the last European election, called Delivering Democracy? The Future of Postal Voting. The commission has carried out various surveys about whether people find that system of voting convenient and so on, and the Government have relied on that information. The report has a very interesting Table 1 entitled "People’s priorities for voting arrangements", and it was written back in 2004, before a lot of the publicity about postal voting fraud had come out. The question posed was: ""Thinking generally about elections, which one of the following would you say is most important to you when you vote?"." The result for all adults was as follows: "My vote being private", 33 per cent; "My vote being safe from fraud or abuse", 30 per cent; "Voting being convenient", 20 per cent; "Voting being easy to use", 15 per cent; and "Don’t know", 1 per cent. In the over-55 age group, the proportion that thought that voting being either convenient or easy to use was important was down to a combined figure of 24 per cent. I thought that that was quite interesting. My suspicion is that a similar survey would now be more biased towards voting being private and not open to fraud. I believe that, as a result of the publicity in the local press to which the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, referred and also in the national press, and as a result of the national scandals that have occurred—notably the case in Birmingham, various cases in East Lancashire and the recent case in Slough—I think that the Government have to take account of what is an increasing perception. A prosecuting lawyer clearly overstates the case many times. Again, I quote the Daily Mail of 2 May—my favourite reading: ""Charles Miskin, prosecuting, told the court on Friday the action of the convicted vote-riggers was like a virus that needed to be eradicated. ‘This week the newspapers are full of what has been called the swine fever pandemic, but there has been another epidemic that has been working its way across the United Kingdom in recent years’, he said. ‘Not of course a threat to life and limb but one that attacks, effects",—" I think that that should be "affects"— ""and corrodes the roots of our democracy"." He quoted the famous, or infamous, comments of Richard Mawrey QC, following the Birmingham case, about banana republics and so on. He went on to say: ""The systems to deal with fraud are not working well, they are not working badly—the fact is there are no real systems. Until there are, fraud will continue unabated. The system for voting would disgrace a banana republic"." There is an increasing perception in this country, which I believe is accurate, that the incidence of voting fraud is on the increase. It may be said that it happens only in a few cases, and the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, said this afternoon that it occurs in only a few places. However, I think that it happens in more than a few places. I have a big lever-arch file full of these cases, which I add to over the years, particularly when we have debates here, and it is getting bigger and bigger. It does not happen in the majority of cases and it is not endemic throughout the country, but it does not occur in only a small number of places and it is not a small number of cases. In my judgment, the number of incidents that get to court are a fairly small proportion—I would even say a tiny proportion—of the total. The problem with postal voting is that it is not secure. I have entertained people previously with quotes from debates on the Ballot Act 1872 and I have quoted Mr Gladstone saying why he was converted to the idea of secret ballots. In that debate, a Mr J Lowther proposed that postal votes should be allowed, that the returning officer should be allowed to distribute votes to people at their addresses and that they could return them to the town hall or wherever. There were warnings in that debate about the evils of proxies and canvassers going about armed with voting papers. Some of us have observed this in the streets; it is happening in this country today. The Ballot Act was introduced to abolish the appalling amount of fraud and bribery which existed before then, when votes were open and people knew how people were voting. If you do not know how someone has voted, all the bribery or intimidation in the world will not work because people can say, "Yes, we have done what you told us to do". In the privacy of the polling booths, people can do what they want. More and more safeguards and complications will be required if postal voting on demand is continued. That will result in more postal voters losing their votes because the more complications that are brought in the more people will fail to meet the tasks. The figures of 5 per cent and 10 per cent which I quoted earlier in two town council by-elections are serious. People are being encouraged to vote by post and some of the votes are being ruled out because they have not fulfilled the obligations. I have no doubt that in at least one of those by-elections some of those votes were fraudulent votes—I know they were. You can tell what postal votes look like when you have been around a bit. They all look different: people use different pens and some people tick or put things in different places. I am absolutely convinced that some of those votes in that by-election had been filled in by people other than the electors. I have seen them before and I know what they look like. Some of them were not stolen; some of them were ruled out because people simply had not coped with the bureaucratic system. The more postal votes you have and the more safeguards you have, the more that will be a problem. Those who want to fiddle the votes will find more and more ingenious ways of getting round the rules. After the Birmingham case, I think voting warehouses will no longer be possible but there are other ways. There is no point pretending that the main problem is not in the south Asian community. I refer to the report published by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust in 2008, Purity of Elections: Causes of Concern by Stuart Wilks-Heeg of the University of Liverpool. He confirms that: ""Greater use of postal voting has made UK elections far more vulnerable to fraud and resulted in several instances of large-scale fraud. … Public confidence in the electoral process in the UK was the lowest in Western Europe in 1997, and has almost certainly declined further as a result of the extension of postal voting. The benefits of postal and electronic voting have been exaggerated"." An interesting part of the report is the section on political and social geography of electoral malpractice. The combination of extended families with a fairly strict hierarchy and links to villages, where the village politics come in, and the biraderi clan system results in people not being able to vote as they want to. My final quote from this report is not from a political ally of mine but from Salma Yaqoob, the Respect councillor in Birmingham, who talks about how votes are taken away from women in Asian families. That happens all the time. She says in the report that: ""Women in particular have been disenfranchised. Postal votes are filled out in the ‘privacy’ of one’s own home. But it is not private when family members, candidates or supporters, can influence subtly or otherwise, the way you complete your vote. Community leaders may claim to be able to yield significant voter blocs, but no one can interfere with the secrecy of the polling station"." Many young Asian women have complained to me that they are no longer allowed to go to the polling station, where they can vote how like, whether it is for my party or any other. I continue the quote: ""A secret ballot means that loyalties to families and friends can be maintained in public, but political arguments can still win out in the real privacy of the voting booth"." Those are exactly the same arguments that Mr Gladstone made in 1872 in relation to bribery. That is why postal voting on demand has had appalling, intended consequences. I beg to move.