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Dump e-voting to stop fraud, Labour warned By Kirsty Walker - Poltical Correspondent, Daily Mail, March 1, 2007 The anti-sleaze watchdog yesterday delivered a scathing attack on Labour's 'obsession' with trendy voting methods. Sir Alistair Graham warned that Internet and telephone voting should be abandoned until ministers get a grip on electoral fraud. The chairman of the committee on Standards in Public Life said ministers were ignoring the 'hard truth' that fraud had multiplied as a result of the alternative systems. "Unfortunately it appears to come down to the obsession with modernisation as a means of increasing participation at elections," he said in a speech to the Association of Electoral Administrators. "Postal voting on demand, e-voting or telephone voting? They all sound such handy innovations; such a modern way to help busy consumers who cannot tear themselves away from the television or the shops to cast a conventional vote. But all the glib talk about the need to find customer-friendly ways of voting by post, text and the Internet has ignored the hard truth that once you allow ballot papers to leave polling stations, the opportunities for fraud multiply and the secrecy of the ballot is compromised." He called on ministers to abandon further pilots designed to boost turnout until procedures are tightened up. Sir Alistair added that a shortened 11-day deadline for registrations would help fraudsters hoodwink returning officers. "This new deadline will provide organised fraudsters with an ideal opportunity to try and undermine the system because they know you will be unable to make robust checks on these new, late, applications., So in relation to the elections this May, I am calling for the pilots to be put on hold. It is a matter of serious concern that we are experimenting with insecure methods of voting when the current registration and absent voting procedures are so insecure." "In relation to the checking of absent votes in May, there should be a guarantee of 100% checking. How does the Department for Constitutional Affairs or the Electoral Commission know about the extent of electoral fraud when neither of them have kept any statistics or undertaken any research on the issue? "Is it that, in their obsession with increasing participation at all costs, they have turned a blind eye to the risks of electoral fraud and its consequences on the integrity of our democratic system?" His comments came only days after Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski told MPs that he had been informed of allegations that Labour activists had secured job working in local post offices in Shrewsbury. The implication was that they would have the opportunity to intercept postal voting forms. The introduction of postal voting on demand and other voter-friendly polling methods have had only a marginal impact on turnout. At the last general election in 2005, it pushed up voter numbers by 2%. Since 2001, there have been 342 cases of electoral malpractice reported by the police to the Crown Prosecution Service. One of the country's most senior policemen has suggested postal voting is wide open to corruption. Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner ~Andy Hayman said last year that there was a real possibility that result could be rigged. His comments follow an investigation into claims that hundreds of postal votes were stolen from blocks of flats in Tower Hamlets, East London, during last May;'s council elections.
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