The biter bit...

It made me smile to an extent the Labour Party candidate for Tower Hamlets complaining about electoral fraud in the recent mayoral vote for that islamic republic London Borough. After all, Labour basically gerrymander the entire Parliamentary process to the extent that you need far less votes to be a successful Labour MP than any other MP of any other party.
The other part is of course the hypocrisy in Labour complaining about the result when the winner in a sense was invited along with his Bangladeshi cohorts in to shore up the Labour vote by rubbing the 'Right's nose' in Multiculturalism and diversity.
Telegraph.

The extremist-linked mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, benefited from “industrial-scale” postal ballot fraud and may also have been helped by “organised fraud in the counting of the votes”, according to his Labour Party rival.
John Biggs, who was narrowly defeated in May’s highly controversial election, said he and party colleagues had seen a number of ballot papers at the count where a vote for him, or candidates supporting him, had been crossed out and a different vote written in.
He accused Mr Rahman’s supporters of a “considerable amount of election fraud, principally centred around the manipulation of postal votes” and said there were “very significant doubts about the integrity of the ballot”.
The accusations form part of a damaging dossier of evidence, some of which will be submitted to the High Court tomorrow as part of an attempt to overturn the election result.
In a separate article for a local newspaper Mr Biggs said: “I remain a good loser, provided it was a good competition. But I am becoming clearer by the day that, remarkably in this mother of democracies, it could ultimately be declared that the election was bent.”

Thing is, Labour, Parliament, the Electoral Commission et al, were warned of this likelihood years ago, by the Bangladeshi government of all people who consider our voting system lax and susceptible to fraud. The bringing in of easily accessible postal voting by Tony Blair's government was simply the cherry on top of the icing on top of the cake in which the supposed votes accruing to Labour went to parties supporting islamic beliefs and faith systems after Labour cast Rahman out of the Party because of alleged corruption and extremist views.
When you invite uncontrolled immigration in from areas which have no respect for the indigenous population, have a history of electoral corruption, who are encouraged not to integrate and have supremacist tendencies owing to a perverted form of religion, you're asking for trouble and indeed it appears we have it.
It's hypocrisy writ large for Labour to complain about what happened, they invited it in despite warnings and even today try to cover up their involvement in this type of dirty politics.
Yet people still vote for them believing that they support the working class, a class whom they've betrayed almost at every turn.

Cheating

When you can't win fair and square those on the socialist left usually resort to cheating, although it's something they share with politicians in general. It means that they use their "ends justifying the means" mantra to ignore the wishes of the many or subvert votes (in the case of politicians simply going ahead and doing it anyway) to get their own way, or rather the way of the activist and leadership.

The RMT are a classic example of this, lead by a man who is a committed socialist (read communist) who decided New Labour weren't socialist enough for his union so set up his own political party to a resounding failure to get votes.
He's been spoiling for a fight with the government (any government) for a while now and sees a chance to send New Labour into the dustbin of history by making them unelectable via strike action. Except that it might be that his membership did not agree with him, but that's ok, you can always find extra votes when on the left (or a Lib Dem) simply by making them up.

Times.

Arsonists struck in the dead of night on April 19 last year. By dawn, the East Usk signal box in Newport was a burnt-out shell and police had started an investigation into the “suspicious” fire.

Few could have imagined that, a year on, the charred ruin in South Wales might have a role in preventing the national rail strike planned for next week.

The East Usk signal is one of 11 “ghost” boxes that Network Rail claims were wrongly included in the Rail, Maritime and Transport union’s strike ballot. The three votes listed from the Newport siding should be disqualified along with all 25 from signal boxes that have long disappeared, the company will argue today in the High Court.

While most were closed this century as automation spread along the railway, one of them stopped operating in the 1960s. 

Chalford signal box, near Gloucester, opened on August 2, 1897, at the bottom of a four-mile hill below Saperton Tunnel. It is still revered by some railway enthusiasts for the safe passage afforded to “auto-train” services in the 1930s – shuttle trains with a cab at both ends that plied the line to Gloucester. But it signalled to its last goods train in 1963 and its last passenger service a year later.

Nonetheless, one RMT signaller appears to have been included in this year’s ballot.

Network Rail says it has unearthed scores of inaccuracies in the signallers’ ballot, which show that the union has “manifestly failed to comply with the requirements of the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act of 1992”.

The vote was so close, its lawyers will argue, that just 112 of 4,556 signallers balloted would have been enough to swing the vote against the strike. Network Rail says that the inaccuracies in the ballot account for almost 300 potential votes. 

As well as including signal boxes that do not exist, the union omitted 26 that do, accounting for almost 100 staff, the company said. Network Rail argues that in 67 other locations, the RMT sought votes from more employees than work there. It says, for example, that the union asked 11 members to vote at South Tottenham, where it employs three signallers; and 33 at Crewe, where Network Rail says it employs 24 people. 

It's a tactic obviously learned from New labour and it's predilection to ballot rigging by postal vote, after all why trust the membership to agree with you when you can simply rig the votes to agree with what you want. Cuts out the inconvenient middle man so to speak, the moderate who simply wants the money to keep coming in to pay his mortgage rather than have his year ruined by getting no pay because it's been decided (not by him) to strike about possible redundancies with a view to loss of safety.
Democracy is a foreign concept to many socialists, useful if it goes their way, but why take the chance...

The RMT are a classic example of not taking a chance, if the reports are true, they would not be on strike this coming weekend anyway, so they decided to cheat, fortunately they got caught, wonder how many other dodgy ballots have been won by phantom voters though.

A higher potential for abuse

The polling system has always had the potential for abuse "vote early vote often" is one of the oft humorous maxims used to describe the various ways that people and pressure groups have used to abuse the electoral system in this country and others in the past. However with falling voter numbers, political parties have looked to other methods than getting people to simply turn up at a polling station, postal voting was always allowable for the sick and elderly as well as those who had recently moved away from their constituency, though a massive can of worms was opened up by Labours tampering with the ease by which it could be done. It's suspected and their have been prosecutions that a massive amount of vote farming goes on in some communities where one person uses the votes of their families to vote en-mass for a particular candidate without the individuals even seeing their voting cards.

Yet I suspect that this will pale into insignificance when this little stunner finally gets the go ahead.

Telegraph.

Online voting would reform Victorian electoral system, watchdog says

Voters should be allowed to select their MP online as part of moves to update Britain’s 19th century electoral system, under recommendations from the election watchdog. 

People should also be able to vote at polling stations throughout the weekend, according to Jenny Watson, the chair of the Electoral Commission.
She also warned that the election night drama of counts around the clock to determine the winner by morning “might not be workable” because postal voting had to be rigorously checked, which is time-consuming.
Watson, in an interview with the Guardian newspaper, said the current system was based on Victorian ideas about the way people lived.
She said: “This is the 21st century, we all have completely different understanding of technology, the way we live our lives, people move away to university, for work.
“People live with people they are not related to. We cannot go on with a system that assumes we all stay in the same local areas, live with an extended family and are able to walk around the corner and be known by the polling agent to vote.
“We want to have a debate that says if we wanted to do democracy differently, in a modern way, while keeping local links, how would be do it?”
She added that the system was designed at a time when at most 5 million people voted but is now stretched to cater for 44 million.
The results of this year’s general election could be more unpredictable than usual, she said, because reforms now allow people to join the voter register up to 11 days before an election could boost turnout.

Can you see the potential problems here of say the political party in charge getting the system hacked to change a few votes in a few key constituencies? Or hackers deleting the system or altering it to suit certain vocal or extreme lobbying groups and their candidates? How about the households with 1 pc and several voters? At least at a polling station there's an outside chance of someone spotting a double or multiple voter, not as if you can ask for all your communities voting slips and certainly not collect them as they're delivered by post as has been done by a few local constituencies.

Guardian.

The three main parties today refused to stop interfering in postal vote applications, defying advice from returning officers and the Electoral Commission.
Evidence has emerged that Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are "farming" postal vote applications - asking people to return their forms to campaign offices rather than the official authorities.

It's simple enough, the political parties can and will attempt to interfere in voting, the more out of sight it is, the more they are likely to try, all have money, all have talented people all have the desire to gain power.The system we had might have been Victorian, but it was far more difficult to defraud, far more difficult to hack, easier to guard and merely required time to count.


Perhaps we should be looking more at ways to get people off their bums and into polling stations rather than make it easy for them not to turn up at all and have their votes "misappropriated" Voting should be made a privilege as well as a right and politicians as well as political parties should look to revising the entire electoral system to make it relevant to all rather than the various special interest groups and lobbying firms.
Compulsory voting might help, provided that an option of "None of the above" is on the voting slip.
Reform the system rather than make it easy/more liable to fiddle is what's needed to be done, not another means to corrupt the poll.