You’re absolutely right to be worried about this Craig – after all; it was how Labour won the Glenrothes by-election.

Have they ever found the voting registers that “went missing” from the Labour controlled Town Hall, which would have shown up the fraud?

Labour are synonymous with Sleaze & Corruption.

Yes, patronage of patriarchy is the modus operandum in relation to communities of South Asian origin in the UK – and not just Muslim communities of S. Asian origin – much as it was during the time of the Raj: Develop native elites. This is the British way of governing.

My family were on both sides of the Great Game in India / Afghanistan during that period, with one lot serving as top-level stooges, high court judges and military adjutants, etc. and also central in the infamous and doomed British attempt to conquer Afghanistan in 1839-42, and the other, throwing stones at, and (literally) being strung-up by, the ‘Tommies’.

Imperial tactics – whether in Ireland, South Asia or elsewhere – never die, nor do they fade away, they just migrate splendiferously into domestic policy.

Btw, just out of interest, and to be a little naughty, does anyone think that the 1992 UK election was fraudulently won? It wouldn’t have taken very much fraud, just a few, judicious manipulations. Then Kinnock went to the EU. I’ve often wondered about this.

Suhayl:

That’s an interesting proposition you make about Kinnock – remember that it wasn’t just him – his son also got a job in the EU and his wife and his daughter got a job in Downing Street.

Its called NEPOTISM – Labour are renowned for it.

“Listening to the Minister tonight, one would not think that in addition to welcoming Polish plumbers, builders, bus drivers and vegetable pickers, we should now be forced to welcome a Polish parliamentarian to investigate large-scale voting fraud here, in the mother of all Parliaments”…

http://tinyurl.com/nnf53f

We are rotten to the core.

Should we not find out who gave the word that established vote-mixing of postal ballots as protocol……and hang them.

Sukayl

No, I don’t think the 1992 election was a fraud.

KevinB

No, we shouldn’t hang them.

The paper chase seems profoundly inefficient in an electronic age.

If we can have unique bank accounts that work 24/7 all year, then why can’t we have a unique ‘voting’ account?

We all have National Insurance numbers, coupled with a computerized data base and a unique password, we could have a secure voting system, that would also be cheap to run and maintain.

Craig @10:57,

Don’t be wet; the best possible way to maintain a liberal democracy would be to threaten death for malfeasance.

With a totally centralised government for efficiency, and MPs given huge benefits via a single accountable very large wage, they would rule under the Damoclesian remit: that if they commit any act of malfeasance, they should be put to death.

“The paper chase seems profoundly inefficient in an electronic age”…

http://tinyurl.com/2j6dk5

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quote_mining

JimmyGiro

No it is not.

I was pointing out that “in an electronic age” fraud can become to easy.

http://tinyurl.com/39pfmp

JimmyG

I once flirted with the idea of e-voting. I came to this conslusion:

In an “honest system” it would be an excellent idea…

Do we have an “honest system”?

lwtc247,

Finance is a system under constant threat of abuse, and yet the electronic banking of a personal bank account works fine.

Therefore even in a dishonest system, a secure private voting account is achievable.

George,

My example was the electronic banking system; if you show me a ‘tiny link’ whereby that system is regularly abused, then I’ll give you a big kiss.

X

Further, if the people so choose, each voting account could be given extra voting credit to those that have a greater vested interest in the government.

For example, tax payers, fathers, mothers, exporters, etc., could be given bonus votes.

“My example was the electronic banking system; if you show me a ‘tiny link’ whereby that system is regularly abused”

I could.

“then I’ll give you a big kiss”

Hmmm…I don’t think I will then,but thanks for the offer.

Jimmy, it’s a poor analogy. If money vanishes from your electronic bank account, you can tell it’s gone. If your electronic vote is wrongly apportioned or not counted, how can you tell?

I like the secret ballot and the physical existence of ballor papers.

Sukayl:

“does anyone think that the 1992 UK election was fraudulently won?”

I vaguely remember that shortly after that election the Guardian published an article pointing out that all the constituencies where the Tory victory did not follow the exit poll results were alphabetically contiguous, consistent with a single block of results being tampered with. Interesting, but probably just coincidence.

JimmyGiro:

The internet is awash with articles showing that the US electonic voting system, administered by Diebold, is so comically insecure it may as well have been designed to ensure that tampering and abuse is possible.

Craig,

We know where our money has gone from the bank statement; likewise we would have a vote statement to account for where and when our votes were received.

MJ,

The Diebold system is not the same as the bank clearing system.

“Further, if the people so choose, each voting account could be given extra voting credit to those that have a greater vested interest in the government.

For example, tax payers, fathers, mothers, exporters, etc., could be given bonus votes.”

As a non-father I disagree.

Not having children is better for the environment. I have ensured that my environmental impact does not continue, perhaps indefinitely, past my death. *I* should get extra voting credits for this responsible act of sacrifice for the greater good!

MJ

Votes are neither centrally collated or announced, so I can’t think how being “alphabetical” could possibly come into it.

1992 was perfectly explicable by the shame factor in admitting voting Tory.

Leo,

I too am seedless, and by being so we have our own vested interests; but parents have their self interest also, plus the responsibility to their offspring’s interest.

The reality is that nature made us diverse, hence we can not be equal, not even if we had egality: the equal right to be different.

It follows then, that our contributions and vested interests in government should be mirrored by our voting impact.

JimmyGiro:

“likewise we would have a vote statement to account for where and when our votes were received”.

But that would still not guarantee that the final published result was an accurate reflection of votes cast and receipts issued. To ensure that, every single voter would have to submit their receipts for independent auditing. A bit like the existng ballot-box system really.

Craig: I don’t think the 1992 election was rigged either. I was just recalling a Guardian article, to show that the question has had some serious-ish consideration in the mainstream press.

A ‘voting account’ sounds like a real bad idea to me. It would most definately end the era of anonymous voting, and this is fundamental to a free democracy.

Furthermore it would be much too simple to create fraudulent results with electronic voting. It cannot be compared with online banking. For example it would be easy to create a ‘hack’ which displays the correct choice made by the voter but counts the actual vote as whatever the ‘hacker’ wants it to be. This would make it incredibly hard to know anything has gone wrong.

Also different numbers of votes depending on who/what you are…… Sounds a little Athenian to me, haven’t we progressed?

MJ,

Computers are good at counting and accounting; much better than people.

CheebaCow,

Encryption will safeguard anonymity. And the ease of hacking would have meant the end of banking as we know it. There was a story of how a Barclays bank employee managed to use their computer system to embezzle £7M. Barclays realised that rectifying the fault was more important than legal retribution; so they did a deal with the employee, whereby he was let free if he told Barclays how to rectify their problem.

Hacking is possible if there is something to gain from it; but there are intelligent systems evolving to counter it. What incentive would there be to hack the votes from regular hackers? If secured computer systems were easy to hack, then the pentagon’s rather open system, would have folded years ago; and our banks clearing system would be defunct.

“Also different numbers of votes depending on who/what you are…… Sounds a little Athenian to me, haven’t we progressed?”

“From each according to their means, to each according to their needs”

I guess it depends on which side of the soup kitchen your on.

Rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic I see?

The system is so corrupt that we need to start marketing our electoral system to any self respecting banana republic, lord knows we need every revenue stream that we can find, after the free money bonanza to the bankers, and the MPs.

Craig, I can attest to postal voting fraud, which is further helped by the lack of any obligations for the ballot papers to be kept, and stored. ie the ballot papers are thrown away!!!

So far as the minority votes go, the feudal structure and the retainers thrown in the way of a few “leaders in the community” ensures the block vote.

Lets face it currently there is more than two million Muslim votes, and how many representatives do these Muslims have? Just reading any paper gives you an idea of the degrees of persecution these people come under, yet, there seems to be no reaction, other lying down and taking the abuse coming forth from the Muslim community, ever asked why?

If someone is voting “on behalf” of a whole family or even a whole street by postal voting, I can’t see e-voting preventing that happening, no matter how secure it is.

HappyClappy, could one possible reason be that those with money and power in the state are in cahoots with those with money and power in the feudal patriarchal set-up of some minority ethnic communities as a means of social control?

I must re-emphasise here that it’s not just Muslims and that it does not refer for example to, for instance, Near and Middle Eastern Muslims, just some groups of South Asian peoples where, partly because of the demographics of migration – rural poor coming to advanced cities, etc. – and because of chain migration and serious initial and in some cases persisting racism, they banded together as they would in the village set-up and have applied the village societal framework to an urban society – which of course has its benefits but which also in the long run is a serious mismatch. The ‘fundo’ thing is relatively more recent in this context, I mean in terms of its effect on the mainstream of these groups, but it’s been a rather toxic ingredient, though somewhat overplayed in the media.

And another reason could be that when anyone else from these communities shouts out about it, or writes about it, or tries to raise money for alternative structures – as many do, in the minority ethnic media, for example, – their voices tend not to be foregrounded in the mainstream media and they tend not to get funded. They don’t fit the paradigm, you see, of ‘bad beardies, waving burning books’, nor of ‘authenticity’ which has bedevilled such interactions for so long and they also threaten to upset the apple-cart of the ‘cosy curry’ relationship b/w two sets of nepotistical power elites.

What lost Labour the 1992 election was Poll Tax. Something like one and a half million voters didn’t figure on the electoral register in order to avoid paying it. If you look at the polls before the election, which predicted a labour win, and the result, you’ll see the difference is roughly the same as that number.

You asked why postal votes are mixed with ballot-box votes. It’s because when that rule was invented we didn’t have postal voting on demand; you could only get a postal vote if you were either physically incapable of going to the polling station (and you generally needed a doctor to certify that) or if you were going to be away from home for a good reason (generally on business or a student studying away from home – holidays were specifically excluded).

Back then, the number of postal votes was so low that if you could see who the postal votes were for it might well be possible to work out who a particular voter had voted for. In the simplest case, local council wards that didn’t have an old folks’ home in might well have just one postal voter – and that one voter would then not have a secret ballot.

When the Labour Government allowed anyone to cast a postal vote, they didn’t change rules that were designed to cope with a few dozen postal votes to deal with a few thousand.

Given just how administratively incompetent this government has been, I doubt it was deliberately introduced to be easier to fix an election – but I’m equally sure that it was deliberately not changed in order to keep fixing elections.

JimmyGiro,

All my concerns were based on problems that can be introduced by governments, not by random hackers as such. This means that encryption will be useless to stop govt spying as obviously they will have the keys to decrypt all the data (a lifetime worth of voting records linked to exact living locations). I’m not too concerned about script kiddies messing with elections (although this is also possible unless appropriate safeguards are implemented). However an electronic election is begging to be abused by any sitting government unless there is also a manual count of all the paper receipts (assuming they even have them), and if that is the case, why bother with e voting at all?

Richard,

Thanks.

Agree with CheebaCow.

Your bank has to know your account. The Government should not know how you voted.

The only way to retain secrecy is to break the link between the voter and the ballot paper once the vote has been cast. In Ireland this link is definitively broken (but only in the last few decades. Previously it was technically possible to trace votes.)

There are all sorts of fiddles possible with paper voting but the chances of them being discovered are a lot higher than with the electronic system.

I consider myself reasonably computer literate and enjoy exploring new cyber frontiers. But I would not abandon paper voting. It is too important to cede to the techies.

Democracy is underrated in Muslim communities. Firstly because a majority of opinion can never outweigh the command of God.It doesn’t matter how many people vote for alcohol, they can’t make it halal. Secondly because of the Hamas factor, that the opponents of Zionism and the West have lost not just their human rights but also their civil rights under the jurisdiction of G.Bush and T.Blair.

Thirdly, because the Zionist and Christian war against Islam dating from the Crusades or before legitimises falsehood in the opinion of many Asian Muslim scholars. Electoral fraud for the sake of self-interest would not therefore be a reason for going to Hell, even though not believing in One God would be a valid reason.

In a multi-cultural society, you have to put up with the fact that the UK has got up the noses of most of the world’s populations. Blair did not understand that the best thing for this country was to stop annoying other countries and to start paying the price of goods we want instead of killing people for them. New Labour got seduced by Zionists into totally immoral neo-colonial aggression. With friends like Israel, does this country need enemies? The friends of Israel in our House of Commons have shamed this country, for a few measly millions in their back pockets. Fortunately, the people of Iraq and even Afghanistan understand that the ordinary people of this country are NOT responsible for Blair’s crimes.

Anon, I totally agree with much of your analysis in relation to colonialism and neocolonialism, necons, Zionism, Israel, Blair, Bush, etc. in relation to ‘democracy’. However, I would like to point out that it is not possible that (to paraphrase) “Zionists have been waging war against Islam since the time of the Crusades”.

Zionism did not exist back then and furthermore, both Jews and Muslims were victims of the Crusades – whenever there was an external crusade against Muslims, there was simultaneously an internal one against Jews in Western Europe.

Quite apart from the massive, prolonged and mutually beneficial Mediaeval interaction, when the Jews were expelled from Spain by the Catholic Monarchs in 1942, many of them migrated to Morocco and to the lands of the Ottoman Empire. In both places, they played a key role in building the strength of those states, esp. in the case of the Ottoman Empire. There is much, much more. Bokhara, Khurasan, Iran, Fez… the whole concept we have of Islamic civilisation was defined and created by people from very many faiths, including Jews and Eastern Christians.

This glossy brochure idea that ‘Jews and Christians’ have always been enemies of Islam is not accurate and is peddled by those on both sides – including dangerous nutters like Daniel Pipes et al – who seek to reinforce a simple, bipolar world-view.

Unfortunately, because of contemporary geopolitics, too many Muslims and Jews have forgotten this central fact and when reminded of it, behave as though one has just told them that the sky is bright green with pink spots. This is very sad and also very damaging. History is key and we neglect or obscure it at our long-term cost.

I meant 1492, of course.

assalamu ‘alaykum Suhayl

Two points about history.

People love re-writing history in the light of modern mores and history finds itself defenceless against the pen and the film. The re-taking of Jerusalem by Kurdish ruler Salahuddin with African Muslims was still remembered by the British in the first world war. So the collaboration between European and Jewish slave-traders was a calculated piece of racially inspired revenge against the African people. The 60 million people who were stolen and arrived if they survived the journey in the Western corner of the trading triangle in chains, had Muslim names and believed in the One God.

I don’t see any difference between that and what we now politely call neo-conservative Zionism. Of course the vast majority of Jews have always been and are still entirely exempt from any such accusation, but Zionism and colonialism have been partners in crime all this time.

Secondly the problem with history is lies. Like the farce in the House of Commons about the human rights of soldiers who are sent to murder and rape the innocent victims of Iraq and Afghanistan. History always records the lies, and anyone who challenges them is regarded as calling sky blue -orange spots.

Walaikum-as-salaam, anon.

Yes, the Western European powers – esp. France, where the Crusades had been based – used the Crusades as a mythic-historic triumphalist justification for their colonialism in the Eastern Mediterranean region.: “Saladin, I am back!” intoned the disgusting French commander in Damascus during WWI. We should not make the mistake of conflating this propagandistic utterance with the underlying rubric of colonialism.

The Crusades were psychologically important in Western Europe as the feudal elites forged their collective, (in theory) cohesive and exclusive tribal identity that way. But at the time, in the (confident and civilisationally dominant) Muslim lands, outwith the ones immediately affected, the Crusades were not regarded as a major event, more a series of border skirmishes.

The Crusades came to assume more retrospective importance in Muslim lands in general as the devastating effects of colonialism became evident, i.e. in the nineteenth century and even more so, now, with the globalisation of the military-industrial complex of The West and the insertion of the colonial settler-state, Israel at the very locus of the Crusades.

It is also true that many of the slaves transported during C17th-C19th were from West Africa, and, as Alex Haley showed most movingly in his novel, ‘Roots’, were Muslim.

However, it is important to note that there were many African and Arab (Muslim) slave-traders – this was and still is used by the West as a propaganda tool to justify capitalist slavery and later, colonialism, but we do have to accept that it was not entirely without basis – and to portray the entire industrial evil of the slave triangle as a ‘Jewish Crusader plot to destroy Islam’ is really pushing matters into the realms of wishful thinking.

Zionism is a C19th political ideology and is basically a form of European colonialist nationalism. There was no coherent political movement which can be described as Zionist before C19th.

History is written by the victors ?” a truism first stated, I think, by Napoleon (and he should know) ?” and remember that the victors of the Crusades were the Muslims. There are many accounts of the Crusades written by Muslims – mostly untranslated though there are some good sections to which Amin Malouf – yes, I know that he is a Lebanese Christian – refers in his, ‘The Crusades Through Arab Eyes’, so there are different and (in relation to contemporary Western power) subversive sources to which one can refer in order to gain a broader understanding of specific historical processes. Edward Said (a Palestinian Chrsitian) and Rana Kabbani (a Syrian Muslim) have also written about this, of course.

History records lies, truths and much in-between and the study of history ought to be – though is not always – an attempt to delineate the mechanisms of these processes and who told the lies, and why, and what the lies might suggest about the historian’s politics, society, etc., etc.

I do not think one can simply dismiss history or rather the study of history because it contains different and often conflicting versions of what happened (as do eye-witness accounts of any crime, for example) and to do so is to avoid confronting the complexity of the world and of human society and also to abrogate our responsibility to exert a detailed critique upon power. Ultimately, such avoidance behaviour is a reflection of a fearful mindset and a spirit cowed by the overarching colonisation of the psyche effected by Western hegemony. This avoidance has nothing whatsoever to do with religion and the application of a kind of absolutist religiosity to the study of history is unhelpful, inappropriate and potentially disingenuous.