Fuddland
I was slightly surprised when my postal ballot form arrived the other day — mainly because I had no idea we were having European Elections so soon, let alone that I’m living in one of the regions where they’re trialling an all-postal voting system: no polling stations will be available. This is rather embarrassing since I read the news daily [mostly via the BBC’s RSS feeds] so I must have just skipped the pertinant headlines through lack of interest.
I’m what you might call a lapsed floating voter — one who is not a staunch supporter of one party through-and-through, but who has nevertheless found that one party in particular has consistently received his support for the last few years. Still, I thought I’d better update my views and check out the manifestos of the main parties; some of the other candidates, such as those for the BNP and Robert Kilroy-Sick’s gang the UKIP, are immediate write-offs, but for me it’s by no means a clear cut choice between the others.
mrtn pointed out something that I didn’t think much of initially, but it played on my mind for some time afterwards. These postal-voting forms have two parts: the ballot paper itself and a declaration of identity, which you much sign in front of a witness [but the witness must not see your filled-in ballot paper]. Both of these parts have the same barcode on them, and I feel this is a major concern: it would be trivial to tie the declaration of identity to the ballot paper, and thus determine exactly who voted for whom — hardly an entirely secret ballot. I can understand the justification for wanting to ensure that election fraud is extremely difficult to pull off — which is what these barcodes are obstensibly for — but to potentially compromise an integral part of democracy in this way is ludicrous. I can find nothing at the Electoral Commission or anywhere else which addresses this issue.
That said, I’ve been weighing up this concern, and the option to not vote as a form of protest, against the flip-side of a non-registered vote possibly being a free vote for those parties with whose policies I vehemently disagree and whose supporters are less likely to be apathetic about voting; in the end the latter consideration was too significant to dismiss.
Comments
richard | 2004 / 06 / 06 – 18:18
You might also be interested to know that the barcodes are used to maintain a list of those who have voted (but not who they voted for) and this list is made available to the political parties in the run up to election day. This is something that doesn’t, and indeed can’t, happen with normal elections.
Also, I have heard something a little worrying about the count in my area. I’ve been told that when the postal votes are received, they are opened by volunteers and the witness statement is checked to make sure it has been completed. Assuming it has, the envelope with the vote in it is then opened and added to a pile ready to be counted on election day. The people doing this are not supposed to look at the voting papers to see who has voted for what. But, in practice, they occasionally do. Imagine you’re doing this and you see your neighbour’s name come up on the witness statement - wouldn’t you be curious and sneak a look at their voting paper?
David | 2004 / 06 / 06 – 18:30
Re #1: Yes, that’s what I was getting at when I mentioned preventing election fraud: it’s important to be able to tell who has already voted. I guess the list is made public to allow the candidates to focus their last-minute campaigning on people who have yet to vote.
But I think what you’ve been told about the counting process is slightly misleading. From the Electoral Commission FAQs [with my emphasis]:
What happens after I send the materials back?
Your ballot pack will be scanned in to show that you have returned it. The elections staff will then, under observation by the candidates and their agents, open the outer envelope and check that your declaration of identity has been properly completed.
After this is checked the ballot paper envelopes are collected together. They will be opened later, also under observation by the candidates and their agents. At no stage will your declaration of identity be able to be seen at the same time as your completed ballot papers so your vote will remain secret. To attempt to discover how someone has voted is a serious criminal offence.
Eric TF Bat | 2004 / 06 / 07 – 01:55
You’re being too paranoid. Think of the up-side to this! If we had a similar system in Australia, most Australians would be deeply embarrassed to risk being seen to be voting for the Liberal-National coalition, headed as it is by Gollum and Barney the Dinosaur, so they’d vote for someone less obnoxious. “Less obnoxious” in this context would include the Australian Communist Party, the White Australia Whip All The Darkies Party and the Who Cares Let’s Just Have A Party Party.
David | 2004 / 06 / 07 – 11:25
A dim recollection from Brown’s mother from her time as a polling station volunteer suggests it is indeed entirely possible to tie a traditional ballot paper to the voter, which inspired me to try searching again for more information [I couldn’t remember either way].
I realised I’d been trying to do things the wrong way round: I was looking for explicit confirmation that the trial postal voting system is not less secure than the traditional system; what I should have been doing was reading about the old system and seeing how closely the new one mirrored it.
Eventually I found a factsheet which confirmed what Brown’s mum remembered.
[T]here are also procedures in place designed to ensure that ballot papers can be linked to individual voters after the election where fraud is alleged. Ballot papers are printed in books and both the ballot papers and the counterfoils are numbered. This means that allegations of fraud can be checked by matching the suspicious ballot paper with the counterfoil, on which the clerk in the polling station will have written the voter number as recorded on the electoral register. … There has been no case of the full vote tracing procedure being used at a parliamentary election since 1911. However, it has occasionally been followed at local elections, where majorities are much smaller.
So I just didn’t pay enough attention when voting at polling stations in the past and did that all worrying for nothing! Well, not entirely for nothing: the barcoding-scanning might make it a much easier task to determine the voter’s vote — good for the fraud investigator, but also good for the people wanting to illegally determine a whole swathe of people’s votes. Still, this is verging on the paranoid so I won’t worry too much more about it.
[Edited by commenter — 11:29]
Brown | 2004 / 06 / 07 – 13:27
Well done Mum!
Lyle | 2004 / 06 / 09 – 13:03
Oooh, spooky. I hadn’t read your post at all (I know, slacking off and not checking regularly!) and have ended up writing something very similar over on d4d™
Great Minds, and all that jazz.
David | 2004 / 06 / 09 – 13:45
Re #6: Watch it, I’ll have you for pseudo-plagiarism. ;)
In your post you share a major concerned of mine, the privacy/anonymity aspect. As comment #4 above says, it appears that the new-style postal votes are no less anonymous than the traditional polling booths, albeit with the potential for electronic database storage being, in some respects, easier to invisibly tamper with than a pile of paper in a locked filing cabinet.
Lyle | 2004 / 06 / 09 – 16:18
Easier to tamper with - and quicker to search, run correlation exercises on, and many other things.
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