STEP BACKWARDS FOR DEMOCRACY
By Frank Melling
The Daily Telegraph
10 June 2004
Original here

I am beginning to empathise with the frustration felt by laboratory rats after being a guinea pig in England's first mass postal ballot.

The good news is that my wife and I live in one of the more switched-on local authorities in the 14 million voter trial, so at least we got our ballot papers on time and with what appears to be the right number of candidates.

But having the chance to vote was the only good news in a system which is wide open to abuse. First, every ballot paper can be individually tracked by a bar code. How long before checks are made to see that local government employees are not voting for parties unacceptable to their employers?

We know of wives who voted on behalf of their absent husbands. There is no check. Simply make some sort of signature on the voting form and you are in business. The concept of one person, one vote is stone dead with postal voting.

Every ballot paper has to be witnessed. Cue the dominant partner. With the huge protection of the voting booth removed how much do you want to stand up to a domineering spouse or bullying flatmate? As for the witness, it can be literally anyone who will attest that the ballot form has been filled in correctly. Criminal, deranged, or even your child. A mark on the line is all that is required.

And how do we know we voted? We have completed the forms and posted them but with five per cent of letters getting lost each day, are we in the lucky 95 per cent whose vote will arrive in time?

Gone forever is the certainty and simplicity of a system which was private, anonymous and accessible to the whole community, regardless of background. That's a major step backwards for democracy.

The search for a secret voting system
Letters to the Editor
The Times
June 12, 2004

Sir, The chaotic manner in which the postal vote business has been managed (letters, June 11, etc) is likely to deflect attention from the basic point -- that a postal vote is always a corruptible vote.

Those who, over a hundred years ago, passed the Ballot Act and the later measures on the mechanics of voting knew that it is not enough to allow the voter to keep his vote secret if he wants to. It is essential also that the voter should never be able to prove how he has voted to another person.

In practice a postal vote can either be shown to another person or can be handed over in such a way that another person can see it. It is this basic fact that all the political parties have chosen to overlook in their haste to increase voting turnout. The Electoral Commission should have warned the Government in these terms and opposed not only all-postal ballots but also the adoption of postal votes on demand.

We must go back to the old way of requiring voters (other than the ill and disabled) to cast their votes in total secrecy in a polling station.

Yours faithfully,
GEORGE CUNNINGHAM,
(MP for Islington South, 1970-83),
28 Manor Gardens,
Hampton, Middlesex TW12 2TU.
June 11.