Postal voting

See link http://uk.news.yahoo.com/26042006/140/woman-arrested-election-fraud.html

We should all be seriously concerned about this.

Although the article above refers to postal vote malpractice in Birmingham, where it was famously detected 2 years ago, I feel the prevalence of postal voting nowadays is an open invitation to electoral malpractice by politicians on a scale not seen since the mid-19th century. My own Borough, Kingston upon Thames, now has 15,515 people entitled to vote by post, whereas only a few years ago the number would have been measured in hundreds.

This dramatic change is because anyone can now have a postal vote on demand, whereas previously one had to be able to give a reason why one couldn't attend the polling station in person. If the reason was illness, the application had to be countersigned by a doctor. Other reasons may have been the nature of one's employment or, in my case in 1983 and 1987, being a candidate at the General Election in a constituency far from home, or having moved to another part of the country. In the last case no postal vote was allowed for local government elections.

Nowadays innumerable ballot papers are issued to people who are dead or have left the address to which the paper is sent or just not bothered about voting or basically ignorant of the system. Such papers are an easy prey for activists locally who might collect them and mark them according to their own wishes.

Someone may have asked for a postal vote in your name to be sent to an address other than yours. You might not find out until you turn up at the polling station - and if you stay away from it, you won't find out at all. And don't say it doesn't happen here. In Birmingham it was proved to have happened in 2004 on something approaching an industrial scale - a system that would 'disgrace a banana republic', as the Judge remarked at the trial.

Can't the electoral officers in our Town Hall check to see that all the papers returned are 'in order'? In theory they do and my experience is that they are conscientious and diligent people - certainly in Kingston they are - but they are also very few and are now dealing with 10 or more times as many postal ballots as they were 10 years ago, but with the same number of staff. So do the maths yourself.

The perpetrators in one Birmingham ward were caught and punished, but they were the tip of the iceberg. There's a serious threat to the integrity of our elections going on here and Blair and Prescott are doing nothing about it. I wonder why.