We are getting to the time when the postal ballots are mixed in unidentifiably with other ballots before counting. This is on the instruction of the electoral commission. This destroys all evidence of fraud – if you get batches of hundreds of postal ballots all for the same candidate, or if the balance of postal votes is vastly different from the balance of secret ballots, there is no way of observing it.
I have tried again and again to discover any rationale for this mixing in, other than the facilitation of fraud. I asked the Electoral Commission when I was a candidate, and was told it was an additional precaution against individual votes being identified. That is complete nonsense – there is no way that counting the postal ballots separately would enable you to identify individuals.
Undoubtedly some readers of this blog will be observers at various counts. Ask the returning officer or their staff at what stage the postal ballots are mixed in unidentifiably, how, and why. I should be most interested to see reports of the responses. If we see a substantial difference between Labour’s performance in Scotland and the opinion polls, this is how it will be achieved.
Paul Cochrane
I actually haven’t voted in this election either because of a discrepancy with my DWP file when I tried to register I had moved to Edinburgh. As I have the same NI number for 40 years that is strange.
Craig,
Are you staying up all night?
Lysias
I’ll follow you into O/T territory and ask you whether you were personally acquainted with Bowra at Oxford.
Pour mémoire: he was at Wadham.
“For starters let us at least have postal voter registrations as a percentage of total voter registration for all key constituencies. We may then know lf Anon1s cousin Jack Straw jnr in Blackburn (35%) and muesli Lutfur in Tower Hamlets (250%?!) are up to no good. Any statisticians out there?”
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Yes. Lysias has told us he studied statistics as part of his DPhil. Perhaps he could help?
Whistleblowers need no longer fear being found having committed suicide inside a zipped suitcase. All they have to do is upload the hidden camera video to Vimeo/YouTube via a public wifi connection using a cheap disposable tablet.
I remember the book “Inside BOSS” by Gordon Winter in which he heard the astonishing claim from his boss (no pun intended) that the South African security secret services knew the identity of all those who voted Communist in Great Britain. But how, he asked, if all the ballot papers were kept secret?
A conversation somewhat similar to the following took place.
“Look, the ballot papers are kept locked in a room, right?”
“Right.”
“And someone has the key, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, what more do you need to know?” (Both laugh).
Observer
07/05/2015 8:32pm
Per G H Graham’s (8:23pm) list of points, point 2, the returned postal voting envelopes are counted.
Therefore they can be compared to the lists of voters who have registered for postal votes and %age turnout calculated.
Kind regards,
John
G H Graham @ 8.23 pm: Thank you for that detailed checklist on how postal ballots are to be handled. I wonder what the process is for the returning officer to be in a position to confirm that these steps have been followed?
In any event, as Craig says, this is an area where there MUST be changes so that warning signs of fraud are identified as early as possible.
Abe Rene
I think you’ll find – Gordon Winter notwithstanding – that Boss’s reach and reputation was a bit overblown. Harold Wilson used to see a BOSS agent round every corner and under every bed.
I have no doubt that when it turns out, tomorrow morning, that there has been no fraud at all of the scale predicted by Craig and imagined by others, there will be people on here who will immediately say “that’s because WE sounded the alarm!”.
There WOULD have been such fraud IF those people hadn’t piped up.
All a bit like the security services, isn’t it, when the reply to the question “but where are all the terrorist attacks” is ” there would have been had we not foiled them”.
Amazing how people on here can hold completely opposite views in the same phenomenon.
Doublethink, some would say; I call it looniness.
Iain Orr
07/05/2015 9:11 pm
This document gives the procedures for Returning Officers, and Part E is the most relevant to your query, I believe.
http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/175365/Part-A-Returning-Officer-role-and-responsibilities.pdf
Kind regards,
John
@JSD – Thank you, and the total of the registrations for postal voting may also be easily calculated as a percentage of the total registered vote, which in £37 millionaire Jack Straws Blackburn constituency has stood at a whopping 35% proportion all these years. Oy vey, at an “expected” 90% turnout then, a foregone conclusion for the lucky boy, that son of his!!
When I posted the procedures, I did not attempt to claim that they were a good defence against fraud or indeed easy to rig.
They are simply the procedures that to the best of my knowledge are the ones followed by the Returning Officer.
But as with any rules/guidelines, any number of them can be broken when 2 or more people collude to defeat the process. Indeed, it would be interesting to discover who is monitoring the performance of the Returning Officer.
Given the procedures that G H Graham has kindly set out for us, I have been giving a bit of thought to how (undetectable) fraud could be achieved. To me, it looks very difficult.
(Craig has made us aware that people have been sent to prison for voting fraud, but by definition these frauds must have been detectable using present procedures.)
If we rule out wholesale corruption of Returning Officers and their staff, then it looks to me as if only interference at an earlier stage of the process could have a chance of success.
– Numbers of fictitious persons registering for postal votes. Hard to see how that could be achieved, if appropriate checks are carried out beforehand. Interference with the electoral register would presumably be necessary.
– Knowledge of which voters have not returned their postal votes, and substitution of a false postal vote in their place. I can’t see how that would even be possible without going through all the envelopes, which would necessitate Returning Officer corruption.
I find the actual mechanics of potential fraud interesting, how it could actually be accomplished.
Kind regards,
John
A key weakness in the system is that Returning Officers are usually the Chief Executives of the local authority. In Labour rotten boroughs, loyalty to the Labour Party is the key unspoken pre-qualification in their appointment.
G H Graham 7 May, 2015 – 8:08 pm : “I posted my vote about 10 days ago and yet still unable to login to the website suggested by Perth & Kinross Council so that I could confirm that my vote has at least been received. The website to the best of my knowledge is – https://piretum.idoxygroup.com“
I suspect there’s at least one error in that website address. The domain name for Idox Group is idoxgroup.com.
http://www.idoxgroup.com/news-and-events/idox-news/71-idox-news/194-idox-elections-secures-three-year-contract-with-the-tayside-procurement-consortium.html
Craig Murray
07/05/2015 9:47pm
Returning Officers presumably don’t do all the granular work themselves – they delegate most of it to staff. Are all the staff corrupt too? Or so cowed by the Chief Exec that they just do as they are told?
Kind regards,
John
It’s 10 to 10, polls are still open. Maybe someone’s peaking in the boxes or phoning back exit poll results early, but the markets are on the move.
http://uk.site.sports.betfair.com/betting/LoadRunnerInfoChartAction.do?marketId=115878540&selectionId=8907139&asianLineId=0
the odds on a tory led minority govt has dropped from 8/1 to 6/1 in the very recent past
Van stolen with 73,000 ballot papers,who’d steal ballot papers and for what reason,as if we dont already know.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/van-containing-70000-general-election-5605184
“A key weakness in the system is that Returning Officers are usually the Chief Executives of the local authority. In Labour rotten boroughs, loyalty to the Labour Party is the key unspoken pre-qualification in their appointment.”
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The above from Craig got me thinking.
All the talk and speculation on here is that there will be fraud – largescale fraud? – by those who are seeking to prevent the SNP from “winning” in Scotland.
But – why is no one talking about the possibility of fraud by the SNP and its members?
Are there no Scottish equivalents of the Labour rotten boroughs Craig has just mentioned? And no Returning Officers / Chief Executives in thrall to the local SNP politicians?
Oh my. 5 more years? Oh me gawks.
RT is now beginning 4 hours of continuous coverage of the UK election.
BBC exit polls giving SNP 58 seats
BBC say COn 316, Lab 239, SNP 58, LD 10
BBC exit poll saying 316 Con 239 SNP 58 LD 10 UKIP 2
“Van stolen with 73,000 ballot papers,who’d steal ballot papers and for what reason,as if we dont already know.”
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Well, RepublicOfPrizeChumps, you may know but I suspect many of us don’t.
It has happened that cars have been stolen with a baby in the back seat. Did you never hear about that?
RT: Exit polls predict Tory majority of 316 seats.
Chris Snap!
BBC exit polls
conservative 316
labour 239
snp 58
liberal 10
others ?
Russia Today? Ye Gods! The man is beyond help.