📮🗳️ Postal voting - it’s time to scrap it.
— Brendan Clarke-Smith MP (@Bren4Bassetlaw) May 7, 2024
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
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.
1 comment:
A quick internet search tells me that there have been more than 100 people found guilty of electoral malpractice in the UK since 1994, mostly concerning postal votes, proxy ballots and stuffing the register with non-existent voters.
Perhaps the most egregious example was in Birmingham in 2005, when six Labour councillors were found guilty. The judge, Richard Mawrey QC, found “overwhelming” evidence of fraud that would “disgrace a banana republic”. The elections were dogged by claims of intimidation, bribery, “vote-buying”, impersonation and even the creation of a “vote-forging factory”. The court ruled against three Labour councillors in Bordesley Green ward and three in Aston ward. The poll was declared void and rerun the following month.
I seem to recall something similar in Slough.
Once upon a time the folk-lore in the Liberal Party was that the matrons in care homes farmed their residents’ postal votes, but I reckon that would be pretty amateurish compared with some of the things that could be happening nowadays.
When I first applied for a postal vote, my declaration had to be signed by a JP. Now, it's encouraged as an entitlement. Personally, I wouldn't object to something in between those extremes.
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