Voting by Post

This morning I filled in and sent off my postal vote in the by-election in the Mile End East ward of Tower Hamlets where I live. I remember a time when it was almost impossible to get a postal vote unless you could prove that your work was taking you away. Making postal voting more generally available has certainly made things easier for the voter and helped keep up turnout. But it also made fraud easier too. Tower Hamlets is not the only local authority where massive fraud has taken place in recent years. Paradoxically, the requirement to have one’s vote (and therefore in theory one’s identity) witnessed made it easier for unscrupulous activists within all political parties to impersonate people or steal their votes by telling electors they would sort out the paperwork for them. All the residents of one tower block in Tower Hamlets had their votes purloined in that way in 2006. So I was pleased to see that the system has been changed here, at least. There was a separate identity check a few weeks ago, with one’s birthdate and signature put on the Council’s database, so when the voting paper itself arrived, it merely had to be filled in, popped inside one envelope which one signed and birthdated oneself, that envelope in turn being inserted into another before posting.

Of course, the great rise in the amount of postal voting has changed the nature of political campaigning as well, as parties now have to get out literature to postal voters well in advance of polling day, and try to canvass them before their postal votes actually arrive. This does make it a bit more complicated for the parties, but if the whole process boosts turnout while at the same time security is improved, so much the better.