The government has enthusiastically taken up the cause of introducing more ‘flexible’ voting methods in order to increase electoral turnout. The fragility of their new experimental systems was brought home to me when my father asked me to witness his postal vote (a requirement that is now being dropped). I wasn’t too concerned because he was voting for the Residents Association rather than a political party.
I am not the only one. The e-voting systems have been criticised. Dr Ben Fairweather, Research Fellow at De Montford University, has analysed the local elections and found some disturbing results. These involved eighteen elections and 1.5 million voters.
He said the system used in Shrewsbury and Kerrier, Cornwall adopted a CESG security model that called for candidate codes to be sent to voters by post, as a security precaution. But people could request this information online on the day in violation of this security policy.
In Sheffield matters were worse. Many polling stations were without an Internet connection on polling day. As a result voters could get a vote at a poling station while still being able to vote again online from home.
The good fellow is also concerned about inappropriate influences within the home, and one could point to our more tight-knit communities where vulnerable members could be forced to vote for particular candidates. These changes encourage communalism in voting patterns.
“For one thing how do you know who’s in the room with someone when they vote and how can you be sure they are not trying to influence someone’s vote?” he asked.
Dr Fairweather’s work is here. The Foundation for Information Policy Research made similar criticisms.
So far, none of these elections have been rerun, even though their flaws have been documented.
“For one thing how do you know who’s in the room with someone when they vote and how can you be sure they are not trying to influence someone’s vote?”
Quite. It would seem Patricia Hewitt used this feature of postal voting to her advantage, according to this article from the Guardian:
In signed statements of complaint, voters say the trade and industry secretary joined two councillors from a Leicester ward, who were asking voters to hand over the council election ballots last Wednesday. Politicians should not handle postal votes according to the electoral commission – although there is no law preventing them from doing so.
One man said that Mrs Hewitt, the MP for Leicester West, stood on his doorstep in the neighbouring Leicester East seat as a councillor asked for his elderly mother’s postal vote, which had yet to be filled in.
Another man said Mrs Hewitt sat in his front room as he filled out his ballot and handed over three others, at the request of councillors whom the minister was accompanying.
One of the councillors, Manjula Sood, said she had collected postal votes.