An election agent writes...
As a general election agent for a sitting MP, I have a few thoughts on this...
Postal voting is important. As noted, you may be away with work (on the day or for a longer period). You may be on holiday. You may be too infirm to go and vote. Or you may be a single parent and have to stay in with young kids. Whatever. If there's one thing you learn from being involved in local politics, it's that people are different and just because you can organise your life to manage something, it doesn't mean they can.
You *can* take your postal vote to a polling station (in your constituency) on election day. You must have it in the envelopes provided, so you're effectively posting it direct to the ballot box, rather than trusting Royal Mail.
Dropping the requirement to give a 'good' reason for a postal vote was sensible: nobody ever did investigate whether it was true or not, and it was a deterrent to people who needed a postal vote getting one.
The Government has done a lot to strengthen the process in the last year or so. For example, councils now do spot checks of your signature, date of birth etc against their other records (eg council tax). If they do this properly, any significant attempt at fraud should be spotted.
The problem in this case is false electoral registration, not with the postal vote process (the Times article was deliberately misleading in this respect). Given the great difficulties councils have in getting people onto the register as it is, introducing more stringent requirements would be blatantly anti-democratic.
Councils can and should carry out more checks (eg 5 more people are living at this address than last year; I think I'll investigate a bit further). A widespread fraud where you just add one or two voters at many addresses (in order to have an impact on the result) would be very difficult to carry out: word would get out, as someone at each household has to be bought into the scheme (to receive the ballot papers).
I could walk into a polling station at 7.01am and pretend to be any man in the polling district. If I spend a day doing this (easy, given that some people reliably never vote), that's maybe 20 extra votes in a parliamentary constituency for my candidate. Undetectable and unstoppable unless you insist people show a form of ID that *everyone* always has. (This is where ID cards and a national ID database link into this debate, not that I'm expressing an opinion either way.)
The Electoral Commission are a civil service joke, living in their ivory towers and failing even to do their admin properly. Like in IT, you're better speaking to someone with lots of experience on the ground (whatever their party) to understand what's really happening.
In summary (at last!), sadly, attempts at fraud are a cost of doing business. Councils need to take proportionate steps to identify fraud. It is possible to detect all material fraud (unless the seat was won by a only handful of votes). Beyond that, further controls are not realistic.
I'll get my coat, because I'm an election agent... (and because I'm off for lunch).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
