The Conservative Party will eat itself

📮🗳️ Postal voting - it’s time to scrap it.

— Brendan Clarke-Smith MP (@Bren4Bassetlaw) May 7, 2024

Why would a right-wing Conservative MP want to scrap postal voting? 

I smell a conspiracy theory. The Tories really won the mayoral election in London or the West Midlands but were somehow cheated out of it by all those postal votes. 

It's nonsense, of course, but we should encourage Tories to believe in this conspiracy theory. That's because scrapping postal votes would harm them, not help them.

Her's another tweet that explains why - I assume BES is the British Electoral Study.

Party breakdown for 2019 from the BES probability sample (all modes, postal n=689) pic.twitter.com/WespXB9n7o

— Matt Singh (@MattSingh_) May 7, 2024

If I am reading this correctly, at the last election the Conservative Party won 43.7 per cent of the votes cast at polling stations and 49.3 per cent of votes cast by post.

As the Conservatives won 42.3 of all votes cast in 2019, I may have missed a subtlety or two. Perhaps it's that these figures rely on how respondents said they voted rather than how they actually voted or  that the sample is on the small side.

Still, Clarke-Smith's comments a good example of how the increasing influence of conspiracist thinking on the Tories is driving them mad.

Lionel King's Biographical Directory of Parliamentary Candidates

Simon McGrath writes on Liberal Democrat Voice:

Following a reference in the Journal of Lib Dem History I recently came across the most extraordinary labour of love, a biographical directory  of   people who have been  Liberal, SDP and Lib Dem parliamentary candidates from 1945-2019.

This is a 20 year piece  of work by Lionel King who I find from the directory is 87, fought Kidderminster in 1964, Sutton Coldfield in 1970, and Walsall South 1987, is  former chair of Birmingham University Liberal Society, worked as a teacher and then TV/Media lecturer in FE and held many roles in the Birmingham and West Midlands Party.

The directory is divided into 14 parts, by region  and gives a fascinating insight into the range of people attracted to become our parliamentary candidates over the years.

I came across Lionel King's directory for the West Midlands myself a few years ago and blogged about it here.

The whole directory is now online. Lionel would love to hear from people who can help him fill out the entries.

Electoral Commission: Hundreds of thousands face exclusion over voter ID laws

It may have lost our data, but the Electoral Commission has found some balls.

Here's the Guardian on the commission's new Report on the May 2023 local elections in England:

Hundreds of thousands of people could be excluded from voting in a UK general election because of voter ID laws, the government’s election watchdog has said.

The laws could have a disproportionate effect on poorer people, those with disabilities and people from minority ethnic backgrounds, the Electoral Commission warned.

It said ministers should take urgent action to alleviate these impacts, including drawing up a wider list of documents that people can show to vote and allowing people without ID to have someone else vouch for their identity.

Ministers won't, of course, because the whole point of bringing in these laws was to suppress the anti-Conservative vote. Even Lord Snooty Jacob Rees-Mogg has admitted as much.

Photo-identity for voters, racism and the Electoral Commission

Forcing people to show photographic identity before they could vote in May's local elections led to racial and disability discrimination. That's the conclusion of a report published today by the all-party parliamentary group on democracy and the constitution.

I can't find the report online, but the Guardian says:

The report, which has been seen by the Guardian, says: “The current voter-ID system is, as it stands, a ‘poisoned cure’ in that it disenfranchises more electors than it protects.”

The authors found that “polling clerks are more likely to fail to compare a photo ID to the person presenting that document if the person is of a different ethnicity”.

They highlighted the case of Andrea Barrett, who is immunocompromised and was blocked from entering a polling station after refusing to remove her mask for an identification check.

The report says: “Their decision in that instance was … clearly discriminatory (and potentially unlawful) because they denied Andrea Barrett the right to cast a ballot purely on the basis of circumstances which arose as a direct result of a disability.”

The point that demanding photo ID from voters disenfranchises more electors than it protects will not be a surprise to anyone who has followed the debate on the issue.

James Meek wrote in the London Review of Books at the time of the local elections:

A 2014 report by the Electoral Commission arguing in favour of voter ID – which the organisation continues to back – conceded that ‘there is no evidence to suggest that there have been widespread, systematic attempts to undermine or interfere with recent elections through electoral fraud.’

But he said much more about what turns out to have been a worrying document:

The 2014 Electoral Commission report, signed off on by its then chair, Jenny Watson, is written in an odd key. Rather than enumerating, in bureaucratic, quantitative terms, the scale of the danger that voter ID is supposed to head off, it deals in hearsay and rumour. 

It names sixteen English electoral fraud hotspots, but doesn’t say, as at least one newspaper (the Times) reported it did, that these are places where electoral fraud has been shown to take place. It says they’re places where people are more likely to say they think it’s happening – where, in the report’s words, there appears to be ‘a greater risk of cases of alleged fraud being reported’.

Who are the people who suspect foul play, and whom do they suspect, and why? The commission hasn’t made public the identities or comments of its respondents in these sixteen areas – Birmingham, Bradford, Calderdale, Derby, Kirklees, Pendle, Slough, Walsall, Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Coventry, Hyndburn, Oldham, Peterborough, Tower Hamlets and Woking – but the report candidly summarises their presumptions. 

‘We have heard some strongly held views,’ the report states, ‘based in particular on reported first-hand experience by some campaigners and elected representatives, that electoral fraud is more likely to be committed by or in support of candidates standing for election in areas which are largely or predominately populated by some South Asian communities, specifically those with roots in parts of Pakistan or Bangladesh.’

The Electoral Commission isn't racist, you understand, but it believes we have to humour voters who are by changing the law to put a burden on all of us and deny some people their votes.

I tried to download the report from the commission website, but was met with notices saying 'The requested page could not be found' and 'We have been the subject of a complex cyber-attack. Find out about the data affected, the potential impact, and the measures we’ve taken.'

In view of the sensitivity of some of the date the commission holds, it's worrying to come across this story on BBC News:

The Electoral Commission has confirmed it failed a basic cyber-security test around the same time hackers gained entry to the organisation.

A whistleblower told the BBC that the Commission was given an automatic fail during a Cyber Essentials audit.

Last month the Commission revealed that "hostile actors" accessed its emails and potentially the data of 40 million voters.

A spokeswoman said the Commission had still not passed the basic test.

This makes me wonder whether it wouldn't be safer to allow councils to look after their own electoral data.

And, though the idea of a body independent of government to supervise elections is appealing, the Electoral Commission does not come across as being that body.