Awesome...
...disenfranchisement by stealth.
Like many things in election theory, it sounds great.
But when it comes to practice, never underestimate the ability of those with a sinister motive to use things like this to their advantage!
UK.gov to roll out voter ID trials in 2019 local elections
The government is to expand its controversial voter ID trials in next year’s local elections. sledgehammer reduces cement block to powder 'A sledgehammer to crack a nut': Charities slam UK voter ID trials READ MORE The trials require people to bring personal identification before they are allowed to vote, and were rolled out …
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Monday 5th November 2018 17:08 GMT easytoby
Postal option?
I thought the biggest risk was associated with postal votes. But I cannot see anything on the release about that?
So my assumption is that this is a drive towards universal ID cards again, not securing voting.
I am a big fan of the convenience of postal voting, as I am often working away from home.
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Monday 5th November 2018 17:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
I doubt there's much in it for passports. Driving licenses might favour the wealthier, who you could assume to be Tory, but bus passes would go the other way. Does the proof requested for voting differ much from that required for, say welfare or unemployment benefits?
Overall I'd be surprised if there's much difference.
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Monday 5th November 2018 17:23 GMT Thesheep
Numbers
The amount of effort spent on this is astounding. There was 1 (one) conviction following the general election in 2017. Of the eight cautions given out, 2 were about postal voting, four were about registration, and the other two were about candidates. So twice as many candidates as actual cases of voting fraud at the polling station.
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/239973/Fraud-allegations-data-report-2017.pdf
Frankly if they put as much effort into things where a real number of people were involved (for example Universal Payments) or if they REALLY need to focus on democracy then there is a whole question about how referenda are conducted...
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Monday 5th November 2018 17:36 GMT John Robson
What a ridiculous concept...
"Voters in Mid Sussex, Watford and North West Leicestershire are testing pre-issued poll cards, which are seen as a less restrictive solution. If someone turns up without the card on polling day, they must present another form of ID."
Hey - at least the above is vaguely reasonable.
I suspect that the 44 counts are those where the 'right' person has turned up later in the day. How would impersonations of people who just didn't bother to go themselves be detected? Do we count it when people say 'Oh yes, silly me, I've had a busy afternoon' and leave?
I happen to know many of the people who man the local polling booth - so I'm pretty confident that I could only vote once, and no-one else could vote as me - but having to bring the card they posted me isn't a huge problem.
Having to bring photoID is a much bigger ask - even non photo ID is tougher now. I happen to have had a lot of dealings with various government departments recently, but I but those letters are "not a utility bill"..
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Monday 5th November 2018 17:39 GMT VicMortimer
Bad idea
This is obviously modeled after some American states, where voter suppression is in full swing this election season.
Voter ID schemes are not about fraud. They're about keeping "those people" from voting. You can sometimes even catch our Republicans being candid about what they're doing.
Don't fall for it. And note that these schemes are always pushed by the "conservative" party, because disenfranchisement works in their favor.
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Monday 5th November 2018 17:59 GMT Jason Bloomberg
I am well and truly fucked if they want ID
I am registered under a legal alias as is entirely my right under current English Law.
An alias for which there is no supporting documentation other than the fact that I use it for electoral registration. The only documentation I could produce is a sworn affidavit saying 'this is me'.
I guess I should be preparing myself for a visit to the Supreme Court.
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Tuesday 6th November 2018 09:07 GMT Alan Brown
Social clensing
Technological "solutions" bundled up for non-"problems" whose primary effect is to dissuade younger and poorer people from voting (because they frequently don't have photo ID such as a driving license, or utility bills in their names, etc)
I wonder which political parties this might tilt the playing fields in favour of?
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Tuesday 6th November 2018 09:20 GMT 3man
Actually, this isn't a solution looking for a problem. The problem the government has is that some kinds of people are less likely to vote for them. The solution is that producing the kind of ID required by these measures is more difficult for these kinds of people and so it will lead to a suppression in their turnout.
If you want to know where this idea came from, look across the Atlantic at the Republican Party who regularly use these tactics to target minority groups, mostly in Southern states.
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Tuesday 6th November 2018 09:34 GMT clyde666
Sledgehammer for the wrong nut
As others have pointed out, the only problem is with postal voting.
There are many checks around the system, and the parties are generally very relaxed about it the way it is.
BUT - postal voting is entirely different. There is really no scrutiny from the political party system around postal votes. There are so many loopholes.
Apocryphal stories abound about nursing homes etc, where bundles of postal votes are filled out wholesale by the manager with no oversight.
There are recorded examples of areas with large military bases where the voting register swelled by thousands in the runup to an election or referendum.
One serious problem from my POV concerns the counting of postal votes. In polling booth scenario, there is a register of voters which gives numbers of actual voters at any station, which is compared to the numbers of ballot papers in the box. This count is overseen by reps from all the parties. Pretty transparent and a lot of work for anyone to corrupt.
However the postal votes are dealt with by council workers away from the count. With the percentage of postal votes now being very high, that is a huge problem area for satisfying democratic concerns.
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Wednesday 7th November 2018 19:49 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Sledgehammer for the wrong nut
"Why would that be, I go to a post office, and I identify my self, vote, pen and paper, and the rest is the same."
What country are you in? In the UK, you apply for a postal vote, the postal ballot form is posted to your home address, you (or someone, that's the point!) fills it in and posts it back. At no time do you visit a Post Office or are verified in any way.
<EDIT> Ah, oh bollocks. I just noticed your icon. You got me, you git!
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Tuesday 6th November 2018 10:27 GMT Geekpride
Deja vu
This is trying to strip me of my right to vote. I do not have a driving licence or a passport, and there is no legal requirement for me to do so. The version of this ID scheme that requires photo ID would mean I would have to pay for a provisional licence to be able to vote. Doesn't "paying to vote" sound an awful lot like a poll tax? Haven't we been here before?
Instead of capitulating and paying for ID, I'd rather run the risk of incurring much greater costs by bringing a legal challenge for removing one of my fundamental human rights.
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Tuesday 6th November 2018 14:25 GMT onemark03
Re: Deja vu
It seems to me that your greater problem would be with an ID card.
If for the sake of argument we were all required to have national ID cards, the issue of no passport or driving licence would not arise and you would still be eligible to vote.
Or have I misunderstood you? I hope not.
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Tuesday 6th November 2018 15:05 GMT DuncanLarge
About bloody time!
Ever since I started voting when I came of age I have always wondered who would permit such an insecure system that is so open to abuse. I'm the guy who knows how computers work and will protest against electronic voting machines or counting machines but I simply could not believe that I wasnt even required to prove that I had possession of the vote card that came through my door!
Anyone who knows my name and address can feel free to use my vote. Jesus, why not leave our houses unlocked when we are out, blindly trusting that only persons who live there would dare to enter...
As long as they have no way to correlate myself with my vote and dont record/store/count it electronically I'm game.
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Tuesday 6th November 2018 23:00 GMT Alan Brown
Re: About bloody time!
" I simply could not believe that I wasn't even required to prove that I had possession of the vote card that came through my door! "
For the very simple reason that margins in virtually every seat are such that unless a lot of personation is happening then it won't make a blind bit of difference to the results - and if it _is_ happening at that level then it invariably manifests sooner or later in the audits as multiple votes.
It's hard enough to get people out to vote. Any form of discouragement is counterproductuve. I have long-serving regional returning officers in my family and they assure me that there are random audits of polling stations and the electoral commissions in virtually every country _do_ investigate rumours of such things - bearing in mind that the chances of any conspiracy remaining secret rapidly approach zero as the number of people exceeds one.
The actual number of such rumours which are found to have substance is very low, vs someone boasting about multiple votes (1-2 every year, they get caught and get slapped around in courts), or stealing postal votes (which is _vastly_ different to polling booth fraud and happens to leave an evidence trail as postal votes are _not_ secret and are kept for a long period after the poll - precisely because of their susceptability to manipulation)
Even with that, the incidence of postal vote fraud is so low that it statistically never affects results - in a marginal or close result those votes are going to be _very_ closely scrutinised and any which seem to have the same handwriting are likely to come in for extra special attention (would-be fraudsters are never particularly smart about what they do - if you really want to game an election you do it by gerrymandering, voter bribes and flat out manipulation of the scrutineers or the counting mechanisms)
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
